By Chris Hedges

April 01, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  PARIS—In the small chapel to the right at the entrance of the neoclassical Church of Saint-Sulpice is a large mural by Eugène Delacroix. The painter, at the end of his career and suffering from the tuberculous laryngitis that would soon kill him, depicted a story from Genesis. “Jacob is travelling with the flocks and other gifts he is taking to his brother Esau in the hope of appeasing his anger,” Delacroix wrote in 1861 when the painting was completed. “A stranger appears, blocking his path, and engages him in a fierce struggle – The holy books see this struggle as a symbol of the trials God sometimes sends His chosen ones.”

Delacroix shows the stranger—an angel—and Jacob wrestling in a sunlit clearing in a thick forest. Jacob, bent with exertion, the muscles on his back tense, attempts to push back against the angel, who stands implacably upright. The mural, created with layers of paint and bold, thick brush strokes that would later inspire the Impressionists, was Delacroix’s final testament to the inherent struggle—a struggle he was acutely aware he would soon lose—with mortality.

Delacroix asks us what constitutes victory in life. What gives life meaning? How are we to live? Why struggle against forces that we can never overcome? In the biblical story, Jacob is crippled in the long night’s fight, then blessed at dawn by the departing angel. He begs the angel’s name. But that name remains unspoken. Delacroix painted the inscription “Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink,” from Psalm 69, over the entrance to the Chapel of the Holy Angels, which holds two other murals by Delacroix portraying clashes with angels. On the ceiling is the Archangel Michael driving the demons from heaven. On the wall opposite Jacob and the angel, Heliodorus is attacked by angels as he attempts to steal the treasures from the temple in Jerusalem. A large window in the church’s stone wall spills sunlight over the paintings.

“Painting taunts and torments me in a thousand ways,” Delacroix wrote in his journal in 1861, seven months before completing his work at Saint-Sulpice. “… [T]hings that seemed to be the easiest to overcome present appalling, interminable difficulties. How is it, then, that instead of casting me down, this eternal combat lifts me up, not discouraging, but consoling me?”