Brought up in the strict Catholic environment of upper class Peruvians and later on subject to the authoritarian education received in a Jesuit seminary, where the principles of Catholic theology were implanted into the young man’s mind, the adult Gauguin seems not to have been very much influenced by this type of education. A cold indifference or an unspoken revolt against the dogmatized, objective religion pervaded his views up until 1888-1889, when his interest in religion revived under the theoretical and artistic influences of Van Gogh, who adopted a highly personal Protestantism and Bernard, a devoted orthodox Catholic. (Amishai Maisels, 400) As a result, Gauguin commenced a series of paintings, which although thematically religious did not reveal the artist’s devotion. Similarly, not piety, but zealous revolt transpires from his two religious essays entitled “The Catholic Church and Modern Times” and “The Modern Spirit and Catholicism.”
Gauguin’s animosity towards the Church determined the artist to formulate his impudent, “innovating” religious philosophy. Based on the artistic symbolist principles, Gauguin’s religious philosophy viewed the Bible as a parable. Gauguin’s attempt to re-interpret church dogma from a symbolist perspective was influenced by contemporary writings on theosophy, such as Edouard Schuré’s Les Grands Inities which establishes in its introduction the general principle common to all religions. Here Schuré distinguishes between what he calls “exterior” and “interior” histories, meaning the dogmatized content of a religion, which is publicly promoted and its esoteric meaning which pertains to the “occult actions of the great initiates, prophets, or reformers who established, maintained and propagated these religions.” (qtd. Amishai Maisels, 401) Under the influence of these views Gauguin tried to integrate Catholicism in this symbolist scheme. He sought the symbolic significance of Christ himself and concluded that Christ’s words reveal his exclusively mortal character. He argued that Christ’s mission on Earth is to offer a model for the humans to emulate, to provide the “ideal Type of Man”.(Amishai Maisels, 438) According to Gauguin, Christ’s presence among humans has more of a pedagogical purpose: it provides the example of a human who elevated himself to the divine ideal and it discloses the path one must take in order to attain the ideal. However, Gauguin did not advocate Christ’s uniqueness and did not limit himself to one religion only. By contrast, he considered Buddha as competent as Christ to provide the ideal type of man. (Amishai Maisels, 438) By refuting the divine nature of Christ and by making Christ quintessentially human Gauguin eliminated the futility of the search for the divine, for he guaranteed that in theory every human being is capable of emulating Christ. In the case of Gauguin and his messianic tendencies practice seems to prove that despite his numerous attempts to follow the model established by Christ, he was overcome by the temptations of his savagery.
Having established the true character of Christ, Gauguin goes on to apply symbolist theories to other religious tenets. He explained that the Resurrection of Christ should not be conceived as a resurrection of the Flesh, but as that of Spirit. Similarly, the Eucharist should be understood as a purely symbolic activity: the wafer and the wine are not mysteriously transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but by means of their symbolic power, the believer is suffused with Spirit. The most remarkable of his interpretations on religious dogma is however, the Immaculate Conception. He refutes the ideal of a literal conception and presents it as the conception spirit, “as a mystic union of the soul, which is the feminine, instinctive, inspired element, with intelligence, the masculine, rational, scientific element.” ( Amishai Maisels, 428) Therefore, by viewing the Immaculate Conception as symbolic only of the greater conception of spirit, Gauguin did not acknowledge the mystery of Incarnation and once again reduced Christ to his mortal character.
http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/boston_catholic_journal_archives_november_2004.htm