Anthony Giambrone, OP
“You Spoke in a Vision” (Ps 89:19)
Iconoclasm, the Incarnation,
the Aspiration of Christian Art
Among the aphoristic fragments of Leonardo da Vinci’s brilliant
and tantalizing Notebooks appear the scattered makings later gathered
as his multivolume treatise on painting.1 After an extensive treatment
in which one might learn everything from botany to the effects of
aging, to the most arcane principles of perspective—even the moral
precepts for a young boy’s proper discernment whether to follow a
painter’s career—Leonardo speaks finally of the supremacy of his
craft: “Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words
and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts.” Yet
words, da Vinci insists, are weak. They lack, at least, some potent
force found only in a picture. “Write up the name of Christ in some
spot and set up His image opposite,” he says, “and you will see which
will be most reverenced.”2 The visual surpasses the verbal through
the icon’s potent magnetism.
Without entering into this interesting debate about the relative
excellence of the arts—on da Vinci’s measure, the film reel would
surpass the brush, by pure power to captivate and attract—we may,
nevertheless, agree on the unique allure addressed to our sense of
sight. It is not by accident that Scripture warns against concupiscence
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iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
of the eye, not of the ear (1 Jn 2:16). A reflection on the implications
of the Incarnation on art might take this lust of vision as a profitable
starting point.
The manuals of the post-Tridentine period generally identified
concupiscentia oculorum as an impulse to acquire, the first movement
of greed, leaving libidinous sensuality entirely to the so-called concupiscence of the flesh. Augustine, however, is a surer guide, I think,
when he finds concupiscence of the eyes in the public’s insatiable
eagerness for spectacles and shows, i.e. violence and erotic thrills.3 A
glance at modern movie culture (I make a distinction here from cinema) is enough to confirm the timeless insight of Augustine’s analysis
and to indicate that greed is, undoubtedly, not enough. The desire
of the fallen human eye is coupled with some deeper, more dangerous lust: that primal cupidity that lured our first parents into their
rebellion.
Sin itself first enters the world through the eye. “The woman saw
that the tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes and was
desirable to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). The irresistible promise the
fruit held was, moreover, in the Tempter’s words, that in eating it,
“Your eyes will be opened.” With our first mother, our whole race
profoundly longs, even to its own destruction, to have its vision satisfied and ever more expanded.
Now, in itself, this urge to see, to have our eyes opened beyond what we now behold, is very good. It belongs to the order of
prelapsarian creation and sets the trajectory of our final destiny. We
are intended, specifically, to enjoy a beatific vision: a sight of such
ravishing beauty and delight that we will be divinized in the beholding. The Creator himself is the term of this avid lust at the base of our
being, and such cupidity in its perfection is experienced as contemplative love. It is for this vision that Eve pined, that her eyes might
be further opened. We are meant to be made wise, by beholding
Wisdom itself, and finally thereby to become like gods.
Scotists and Thomists will, of course, disagree (as is their habit)
on the essentially supernatural character of the human desire to be-
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hold God; and, though I’d rather not wade into this difficult controversy, I (as is my habit) prefer the Thomist line. We naturally desire
to look upon God, for we innately recognize that, like the trees in
paradise—like all the glory that still shimmers even through our
damaged and dimmed creation—God too is supremely delightful
to behold. We are naturally dissatisfied, however, with all those created analogies and images that keep our knowledge of God ever at a
distance.
This simultaneous desire and dissatisfaction is not only the insertion point for an elevating operation of grace; it is also, at a natural
level, if I may so pronounce, the generative context of all the arts.
Put another way, art, in all its manifold expressions, is both born
of and ordered to mankind’s God-oriented contemplative appetite.
Art surges forth from some elemental responsiveness to what is supremely delightful and from our aspiration to sustain an ecstatic gaze
upon that beauty: a beauty, sadly, which, during our earthly lives,
continually eludes our grasp. Art seeks to capture intuitions of the
eternal, as thought in its own way seeks the same.
The idea I propose is already more or less familiar. C. S. Lewis
propounds something like this in a variety of places.4 He perceives
in human experience a primal nostalgic yearning, a longing awakened specifically by art and in encounters with earthly beauty, but
never terminating there—hence always left unsatisfied and straining toward the transcendent. St. Thomas would hesitate to reckon
this an apodictic proof of God’s existence; but the Fourth Way, the
argument from gradation, hints at the fact that our every experience of sublunar beauty is grounded in some intuition of the summum
pulchrum: God, the sovereign Beauty beyond all beautiful creations.
At this point, I would like to recall the provocative opening to
Ernst Gombrich’s classic introduction to art history: “There is really
no such thing as Art.There are only artists.”5 It is right that Gombrich
turns our attention to the creative power of the agent. The Renaissance and Romantic construct of artist as genius brings its own humanistic baggage, of course, but as I have said, the generative p­ ower
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
of art truly does tap the wellspring of man’s greatness and peculiar
connaturality with the divine. When Gombrich suggests, however,
that the sum total of all the activity of artists throughout the ages
ultimately lacks an essential unity, he leaves us without the proper
moral resources to recognize art’s inner aim. He does not see in all
art the self-same striving to capture and crystallize some apparition
of transcendent beauty. The great art historian thus leads us astray in
opining, “I do not think there are any wrong reasons for liking a statue or picture.” To this I would simply say, there most certainly are.
The famous story of “Lucian,” which tells about the man who tried
to copulate with Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite at Knidos, proves
the point with embarrassing clarity.6 The artist and the beholder are
meant to be aligned in a common search after all that is desirable to
lead us to Wisdom.
What is more pertinent here and what, charitably read, Gombrich suggests is that our reasons for liking some statue or image
remain permanently elusive; no exhaustive explanation of our pleasure can ever be offered. To be sure, critics may articulate an endless
number of perfectly accurate observations about this or that work:
such a juxtaposition of colors has this precise effect; this modulation or that variation on a pattern stirs us by its brilliance. Still, the
proto­beatific delight afforded by art stubbornly surpasses the power
of words to capture.7 All art, however humble, places us in contact
with the suprarational realm of the ineffable.
Now, unfortunately, as we know, our contemplative faculty, along
with our entire apparatus of desire, has gone awry. Simply put, we
no longer desire aright, because like Eve we are distracted by created
things and forget the author of their beauty. Created loveliness, short
as it falls, grips us with a power that threatens to short-circuit and
undo us. The Achilles heel first bitten by the serpent, the eye, thus
remains a battleground for the soul. “If your eye is evil, your whole
body will be full of darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how
dark will the darkness be” (Mt 6:23). The eyes of men were indeed
opened in the garden, but not to peer upon Wisdom—rather to be-
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hold the world in the unbecoming light of sin. Under the sway of
our inherited, concupiscible nearsightedness, we now gaze out at the
world through the twin lenses of contentious violence and aggressive
sex. Like Tobit’s, our eyes have been poisoned, clouded over with
filmy cataracts. Our vision must be healed. But like the Pharisees in
John’s Gospel, our sin arises from the fact that we say we see, but
are blind.
Enter here God’s plan of restoration. To heal our sight, he first
showed us that we were blind. The Mosaic Law was added on account of sin, St. Paul says to the Galatians, and at the Law’s head we
find a startling command: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that
is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Ex
20:4). While all the nations roundabout had their senses sated with
images or idols of their divinities, Israel ascetically stood before her
God in overawing aniconic darkness. His name was revealed, but
not his face, for God’s command had forbidden it and quieted man’s
natural longing to gaze upon the divine. Therewith a moratorium
was placed upon the arts. When the search after God died, art died
along with him.
This prohibition of images, folded in under the first commandment in the traditional Augustinian enumeration, belonged later to
the Calvinist theological agenda against the Catholic cult of religious
art. It thus emerged in the Reformed numbering as a self-standing
second commandment. This was not pure innovation, however, but
represented, in fact, a more primitive Jewish reckoning. Philo, the
first-century Alexandrian middle-Platonist, and the Talmud would
both have agreed with Calvin’s accent on iconoclasm.
The accent is fitting. Along with her strident monotheism, a divinely imposed hunger fast for the eyes is a truly singular appearance
in the history of ancient religions. No nation outside the Jews ever
conceived such a thing. The Jews, rather, were mocked for the empty
inner sanctum of their Temple. Small wonder, then, that the strain
of living in this blind posture, imaginatively sustained only by the
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
n­ aked word, was often more than Israel could bear.The golden calf is
the eternal emblem of the senses’ rebellion against Israel’s ascetical,
theological regime. The visible and tangible calf haunts the history
of Israel, moreover, and was not a mere one-time affair afflicting the
fledgling nation. Indeed, after the schism of 935, Jeroboam and the
Northern Kingdom instituted a permanent cult in Dan, where the
very God who led the nation out of Egypt was worshipped again
under the guise of the golden calf.
At the risk of defending the indefensible, it is useful to reflect
for a moment on what exactly was and was not at issue in Israel’s
struggle against this graven image. The Israelites, both in the desert
and in the Land, indulged here not the worship of false gods, but false
worship of the true God. That there should be a difference between
these two brings us to a critical point.
In the context of biblical religion, it is not sufficient to see through
the lies of fetishism: the crude polytheistic belief that images are animate with superhuman personalities. This was—at least with the
help of Revelation—a thing rather easily dispensed with. Classical
Hebrew, in fact, has no single word for idol, but only a cluster of
derisive slurs exposing the fraudulent claims of wood and stone to
be divine: aven, elil, gillulim, chevel, sheqer, pigrey: “vanity,” “nothing,”
“excrement,” “puff of wind,” “lie,” “carcass,” and so on. The delicious
and disdainful irony of stories like Bel and the Dragon in the Book
of Daniel are masterpieces of religious satire and polemic. The vapid
nothingness posed by the pagans’ pretender gods is not the real heart
of the matter.
In Old Testament religion, the representation of the living Lord as
an incarnate form is in some way the highest horror. A look around
at the surrounding nations helps us understand why this might be.
One single trip to the Cairo or the Pergamom museums suffices to
illustrate the wisdom of prohibiting images. The idols of the nations
were monsters: men with alligator heads and great winged, bearded
bulls. The Gentiles incarnated the divine in prodigies of miscreation,
one form more terrifying and incomprehensible than the next. Faced
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by a fallen race suffering from grossly distorted vision, the living
God refused to allow his face and true nature to be misrepresented
in such terms.
In the ancient near east—Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan—
only half of Rudolf Otto’s celebrated definition of the Holy was understood: mysterium tremendens et fascinans. The numinous was considered tremendens, frightfully frightful, but certainly not fascinating.
Divinity has nothing alluring or comely about it.
Elsewhere, however, another vision of numinous beauty was
afoot. Greece stands aloft as the great, luminous exception to the
entire trend of idol-making in the antique world. What we revere as
humanistic marvels—proportioned marble bodies of untold stately
grace—were, in fact, idol images of their gods: Aphrodite, Hermes,
and Zeus.
Dion of Prusa, a first-century orator and first to earn the title
Chrysostom, explained, in his apology for Greek art, this artistic
anomaly in the following highly suggestive way: “We invest God,” he
said, “with the human body since it is the vessel of thought and reason. In the complete absence of a primitive model we seek to reveal
the incomparable and the invisible by means of the visible and the
comparable, in a higher manner than certain barbarians who, in their
ignorance and absurdity, liken the divinity to animal shapes.”8
From a Christian perspective, it is impossible not to perceive in
this sentiment a providential preparation for the momentous event
of the Incarnation. The religious reverence, even awe of the classical
world for the surpassingly beautiful “vessel of thought and reason,”
the harmonious human form, appeared to the Greeks the only fitting
incarnation of the divine. And they were correct.The Cross may look
to them like folly, but a god’s apparition in this excellent, rational
image was a welcome thought among the Greeks.
The cult of nudity so unique in history to this great classical culture, eventually spilling into Rome’s arts, is not merely about the
body (like our own culture of pornography), but is closely linked
with moral concept of virtue: kalagathia, the beautiful and the good
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
as one embodied thing together; mens sana in corpore sano, a sound
mind in a healthy body. Exaggerated talk about Platonic dualism
thus leads us astray. It was the Greek mind that also conceived of a
hylomorphic unity of soul and body. The Hellenic spirit accordingly
saw and understood and skillfully made visible in their sculpture the
great biblical truth that men and women are somehow an embodied
divine image and likeness in creation. Thus, what in Israel manifested as an absolute intolerance for false worship of the true God, was
in Greece manifested more as true worship of false gods. The looming collision of these two epic trajectories was destined to shake the
world.
It is unfair, of course, to pretend that the Greeks somehow discovered a truth unknown to the Chosen People—even if the Jews’
relation to nudity was diametrically opposed to that of Greece, repelled not least by the horror of worshipping a creature. Salvation,
however, comes from the Jews, and that means no truth is alien to
God’s people. It is crucial to note, then, something very interesting
about Jewish iconoclasm. A comparison with the other great aniconic Abrahamic faith will make the point.
While the first emergence of a prohibition against images among
the Muslims remains a matter of some mystery, and its observance
has been and remains a widely diversified phenomenon, Islam inhabits an apophatic cloud significantly more impenetrable than Judaism.
Historically, Sunnis are, typically, more stringent here than Shiites,
widely rejecting the representation of all living creatures and often
enforcing the teaching through iconoclastic violence. Despite such
differences, Islam, nevertheless, generally and quite emphatically
surpasses Judaism’s concern to preserve a halo of transcendent reverence around the divinity. Allah is other and unapproachable as the
Lord of Israel is not.
Poignantly, this is seen in the Koran’s version of Moses’s plea to
see the face of God, which takes a very different turn than the original biblical story.9 In Exodus 34, having begged to see the Lord’s
face, Moses must be content to behold God’s back—which, quite
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tellingly, he does, after the Lord mysteriously passes by. In the Koran, by contrast, Moses is knocked unconscious, never sees or hears
anything of the divinity whatsoever, and, significantly, repents of ever
having asked to see him.
This is entirely what Islamic art would lead us to expect. It is
characteristically geometric, and such abstraction is characteristic of
the unwaveringly eternal. Nothing of the unsymmetrical character
of concrete individuals, this or that thing encountered contingently
in history, treads through these heavenly fields. Such art is moreover calligraphic: it is a text, a word, a distilled communication of
pure reason—reason that observes a strict aniconic propriety. Thus,
even the mental representation of Allah is a matter of high concern
in Muslim theology, and the abstract attributes of the “Ninety-nine
Beautiful Names”—Holy, Merciful, and so forth—enforce a rigorous philosophical chastity on the human imagination’s role in thought
and worship.
The Lord of Israel also has his litany of names, but these are spoken, profoundly, exactly at the moment Moses beholds his back. God
himself speaks in a vision, pronounces his name as he lets Moses catch
a glimpse. Thus what the prophet sees is what he hears: “The Lord,
the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding
in faithfulness and love” (Ex 34:6).
The great paradox of Old Testament aniconism thus comes to
light. Israel was called to desire God’s face, yet not permitted to depict it. “It is your face O Lord that I seek! Hide not your face!” David
cries along with Moses. In Israel, the desire to see the Lord is holy;
but for that very reason, it is also deadly. Here we have both poles
of Otto’s Holy. Even so, the Lord protects his people from the terrifying images of a terrible God, far too easily formed, by blanketing
Israel in iconoclasm and speaking to her of his graciousness. Israel’s
longing that God should show himself was, hence, at once purified
and intensified by her asceticism. By constraining his self-disclosure
to the word alone—a kind of half-vision, as Moses had—reason itself became the vessel of God’s image in Israel.
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
Now, all that moves art toward reason and abstraction has the
effect of intoning the transcendent and eternal, and this is indispensable. Nevertheless, a balance is required to maintain the proper character of the vision. Outrageous geometrical painters like Piet Mondrian have lost all account of art’s significance as an act of historical
human agents actively striving for God in nostalgic disappointment.
Like Islamic art, his work represents an accomplished perfection, not
a dissatisfied yearning. Despite what clever critics might say, it is hard
to hear the otherworldly call that Lewis so keenly heard when staring
at a canvas of colored squares.
“Reason’s vessel,” the human body, on the other hand, evokes
the most intense imaginable yearnings and presents a profound artistic challenge. It is no accident that mastery of the body remains
the fi­ nal and highest accomplishment for apprentices in draughtsmanship. The human body is supremely desirable and delightful to
look upon. Our form is eternal with all the geometric, harmonic
beauty of the Vitruvian man, but at the same time ever unsatisfying
in the endless variations we suffer from our ugly breakdowns in
perfect proportion and from our inescapable experience of physical
corruption. Transcendent longing, however, awakens only from an
artistic vision incarnate enough to fall short of the ideal but close
enough to excite desire.
The perennial task laid before the artist is thus to see both this
sublime eternal form and its historical shape. In this sense, so-called
“realism” risks becoming an ideology. What is real? Not only the raw
material, imagined as a brutal critique of airbrushed idealism, for instance, in the corpulent, corrupting, animal bodies of Lucien Freud’s
grotesque vision. Real is also the entrancing beauty of the immaterial
human soul as captured through the eyes of someone like Zinaida
Serebriakova, whose masterful studies are sadly so unknown. The
sleeping nudes of Freud look dead and indeed mean to extinguish
the life-force of the soul, in which he did not believe and thus could
not see. Serebriakova’s nudes also sleep, but they powerfully awake
and excite our desires, even while exuding the calming pleasure
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of perfection. Sir Kenneth Clark’s magisterial work is insightfully,
rightfully titled: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Beautiful nudes, more
perfect than we, are not a lie to nature—even if the ideal can go
too far and float free of historical persons, as the nineteenth-century
revolt against academic painting made plain. The optimal challenge
proper to every artistic act is acutely found here; for the challenge of
maintaining the tension of supernatural desire, elevated and tinged
by disappointment, finds its acme in the portrayal of man, who is
neither animal nor angel, but the only embodied rational creature.
This is the specific challenge of beholding at once the immanent and
transcendent, the body and soul, in a single, integral vision.10
I return, then, to the Jews. It is a fact rarely observed, but remarkable when seen against the instinctive Jewish horror of every
idol, that Jews, with no apparent signs of blushing, tolerated in the
written scriptures, a lavish range of images, even animal depictions
of God. Abir Yakov, for instance, the “Bull-Calf of Jacob,” was as ripe
a candidate for the theological censor as could be wished. The anthropomorphisms, however, are most profound and by far prevail.
The Lord appears as a man: working with clay and walking in a garden, growing angry and smelling the aroma of sacrifices. He shows
his backside to Moses, his prophet, and even, mysteriously, sits to
sup like the three men with Abraham. This pagan permissiveness of
word over image is quite striking. In Israel, poetry—words—could
go where pictures were forbidden.
Perhaps the most concrete example of poetry’s scandalous freedom to clothe God in human garb appears in the Song of Songs. In
this widely misunderstood but gorgeous poem, which must be read
in the light of prophets such as Hosea, Solomon provides an elaborate and sumptuous description of the body of the Bridegroom, a
symbol at once for Israel’s God and her Messiah. His members are
lauded seriatim: “His head is the finest gold. / His arms are rounded
gold, / His body is ivory work, encrusted with sapphires. / His legs
are alabaster columns” (Sg 5:14–15). This casting of Israel’s divine
spouse in a body made of precious stones and metals recalls the idol
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
descriptions present in books like Daniel, where pagan kings are cast
to be worshipped in this guise. These verses in the Song are, in fact,
modeled on the so-called Gottesbilder (“Idol Image”) texts, the handbooks ancient idol craftsmen used to codify the iconography of the
cult images of their pantheon, exactly as medieval artists used manuals to catalogue all the symbols and postures of the saints. In this high
poem, the Lord for whom Israel longs enjoys a verbal incarnation
like a graven image worthy of any Mesopotamian divinity.
Observe, however, that this divine figure, who embodies all
­Israel’s expectations for God’s appearance, gloriously appears in
the form of a man. The pagan impress on the Canticle is enormous.
The book’s ultimate background, in fact, lies in pagan fertility cults.
The scandal of this Song, more excellent than all other Songs—the
highest artistic summit of Israel’s scriptures—is not, however, that it
speaks frankly (and beautifully) about the reality of human eros. The
scandal is that here Israel dares to imagine herself as close to the Lord
as the Canaanite love-goddess cult brought its worshipers to their
gods: into physical, conjugal union. Israel draws her God so near that
she can, as she sings of him so sublimely, “hold him and never let him
go.” The transcendent God, who will not be held by any image, is in
this book made a man held “captive in Israel’s tresses.”
The Bible thus opens up on the frontiers of poetic daring an
imaginative space, prophetically stoked, in which lusty visions of the
unseen God are vigorously entertained. What the second commandment distinctly forbade was thus in another way counteracted, even
undermined by the expectations and excited desires that God’s Word
itself aroused. The Lord had always intended to let himself be seen,
to draw near to us; but it was for him alone to fashion the perfect
vessel.
And let himself be seen he did, as we confess: the Word was made
flesh and dwelt among us. We might even say, Scripture became a
man—for, in the spiritual sense, all inspired words speak but one
word: Christ. In accord with the interior thrust of Scripture, an image of God was indeed cast, but not as a dead idol of wood or stone,
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“with eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear” as the Psalmist
says. Rather, he appeared like the man St. Paul calls a living spirit,
made directly by the hand of God. The Bridegroom of the Song,
God’s own Word, stepped off the page and was made living flesh.
The Incarnation is thus a hermeneutical event; it is the hermeneutical event. Christ’s coming alone allows those critics we call exegetes and theologians to interpret rightly the poetry of God. From
the moment the Word assumed human flesh, the whole meaning of
Israel’s Law became subject to a decisive new act of interpretation.
It is precisely here that the great Christian Iconoclastic controversy
belongs, for it was as much a struggle over exegesis as it was a matter
of Christology. At stake was how to understand and observe Exodus
20:4, the prohibition of images.
As with Islam, the emergence of iconoclasm in the eighth century Byzantine East is a matter of scholarly debate. Peter Brown says
the history here is vexed by “a crisis of explanation.”11 At least since
Arnold Toynbee, however, it has been common to link this Christian
theology with the ascendency of Islam. The Arabic ethnicity of Leo
III, the first iconoclast emperor, is certainly suggestive. Whatever the
ultimate causes, however, and without entering into the details of the
debate, the final resolution, after the second wave of the crisis, bore
fruit in the profound thesis of Theodore the Studite. An icon depicts
the person, not a mere nature.
What does this mean? The claim should certainly not be pressed
that after the Incarnation all Christian art must be overtly liturgical, as if the depiction of nature or the techniques associated with
naturalism were for the Christian unworthy, as if the writing of icons
exhausted the full scope of true Christian art. This extreme is a characteristic imbalance in eastern Christian thought, particularly in
Russia, where, despite its Byzantine heritage as the self-proclaimed
Third Rome, the humanist Greco-Roman tradition of art, was, for
political as much as religious reasons, often rejected as a Western
threat. Nevertheless, it is to Mother Russia that one must turn to
understand the significance of the icon.
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
The best commentary appears in a forgotten little masterpiece
of Russian literature: The Sealed Angel by Nikolai Leskov, written in
1872. Expressing his desire to acquire a real icon and not simply
a well-made drawing, the pious protagonist explains the difference
to his companion: “With respect to worldly painters, even the most
perfect representation of the drawing would not suffice, since these
artists have only learned how to depict the earthly body and the
techniques that can portray a bodily human, whereas in the holy art
of Russian icon writing the transfigured heavenly body is depicted,
which the material person cannot even imagine.” The transfigured
heavenly body is the specific aspiration of the icon, requiring more
than mere tricks of perspective and chiaroscuro.
It has been said that twentieth-century painting is characterized
by a striking inability to portray the face of Christ. The charge is severe, but highly revealing. One might consider highly successful and
moving works like the Ecce Homo of Georges Rouault; but it would
likely leave Lescov’s character unsatisfied. At issue here is what the
Studite saw: the person, not only the nature, must be portrayed.
What this means, in fact, is that the divinity of the Eternal Word in
his human nature is the proper subject of the icon: one strives to
depict the visible grace of Christ’s hypostatic union. It is no accident that the single natural analogue to this mysterious union was for
Cyril of Alexandria and the fathers the union of body and soul. The
icon, as the summit of artistic striving, thus bears an inner likeness to
the portrait, which strains to capture that created image, the human
person; contemplation of the human face most nearly brings us to
contemplation of the face of Christ.
God became human. He furthermore became man. The gendered
humanity of Christ has enormous significance, as should be obvious
from any reader of Solomon’s Song. The great Leo Steinberg, a Jewish
art historian of distinct interest for the theme of our reflection, has
highlighted this point of Jesus’s gendered manhood in his landmark investigation into Renaissance art, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art
and in Modern Oblivion. Briefly, Steinberg showed that for ages art critics
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and viewers alike looked and looked without seeing—without seeing,
that is, an unmistakable interest in the male member of Jesus in European art, from about 1260 into the 1530s. Whatever Freudian repression one might detect behind this blindness, a particularly common
and telling example of the trope is evident, for instance, in Adoration
of the Magi scenes, where the Christ child sits on the Virgin’s lap quite
naked while one of the kings peers ostentatiously between his legs to
inspect whether this God has indeed truly been made completely man.
Outrageous attention to the loincloth of Christ on the Cross, along
with gestures by which Jesus patently directs the viewer’s attention to
his manhood are among the other ways Steinberg illustrates his case.
Please see the cover of this issue of Logos to find Veronese’s Holy
Family, with an ostentatio genitalium modeled on the ostentatio vulnerum, Jesus’s display of his wounds—fittingly, for the first drops
of precious blood were actually shed at the circumcision. The book
must be read, or at least the pictures seen, but this much is clear.
As Steinberg argues, a conscious engagement with the untouchable,
scandalous idea of Jesus’s member was Renaissance art’s direct response to Christian confession of the scandal of the Incarnation.
The theme, in fact, penetrates deeper into Christian art than the
limited pictorial realm of Steinberg’s investigation. As Christ’s humanity became increasingly the focus of thought and devotion beginning especially in the thirteenth century with Franciscan piety, the
gendered manhood of Christ came more and more into the field of
vision. One thus finds Jesus cast as a courtly knight wooing female
souls in devotional poetry, for instance. This whole trend stands behind the explosion of emotional Sponsa Christi spirituality in much
devotio moderna.12
If Western art resonates profoundly with the gendered manhood
of Christ, theological reflection can extend this graphic insight even
farther. Alongside the downward movement toward the embodiment of the divine in manly form there appears a necessary complement. The nuptial meaning of the body, to use Saint John Paul’s
term, i­ndicates that Christ is imaged as belonging to an ensemble,
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
what Balthasar calls the Christological constellation. The Madonna
and Child, a kind of statue group, is the perennial icon of this fact.
To be a gendered man means that Christ stands oriented in his flesh
towards a woman.
So, the Lord prepares a fitting vessel for himself. He comes in
person into the very midst of mankind, taking on himself the form of
a man. But the Lord does not merely prepare for himself one single
human body. He must also prepare all those around him who will
in some way contain him. Indeed, ultimately, eschatologically, God
must make all humanity and all the world a fitting vessel and image.
This is signed and begun in his crafting of his Mother and his People.
As he lowers himself and becomes man, both are raised up simultaneously, made divine, and given his image.
It is no accident, then, that next to the Bridegroom text I quoted from the Song of Songs is a parallel text in which the man describes the woman. This poem, too, employs imagery reserved for
the appearance of a god. In a symbolism that must be decoded, she
is praised, in fact, as an epiphany of the goddess of love, known in
the East as Ashera or Astarte and by the Roman world as Venus. Like
Praxiteles’ sculpture (the first female nude in ancient Greece), the
Bride of the Song is provocatively depicted and all her womanly radiance laid bare.
How graceful are your feet, O queenly maiden!
Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master
hand
Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine
Your belly is a heap of wheat encircled with lilies
Your breasts are like two fawns
Your neck is like an ivory tower
Your eyes are pools in Heshbon
Your head crowns you like Carmel . . . (Sg 7:1–5)
Israel, in this brilliant stroke of the inspired poet, has replaced
the goddess who is the consort of the Mesopotamian creator god.
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She is beloved of him and divinely beautiful in his eyes. God’s People
have here been imaginatively divinized in word. Artistically, what
has transpired resembles the case of Francisco Goya’s Maya Desnuda.
Goya painted his mistress, Maya, nude in the iconic pose proper to
Venus according to the settled conventions of European art. He intended thereby to provoke viewers, saying at once, divine Venus is
dead and my lover is the goddess. The trick, in fact, had already been
done.The Lord already dethroned the idol and put his passion, Israel,
in her place. Or if you prefer, in the art of God, the beautiful dreams
of the pagans are fulfilled.
But this is God’s own poetry. The one loved of him is divinized
therefore not only in word, but in living deed. I would like here to
quote the nineteenth-century poet, Heinrich Heine. In his poem,
“The Song of Songs,” he sings his own ode to the beauty of woman as
God’s creation. I quote first in German to give the wonderful music
of his words:
DesWeibes Leib ist ein Gedicht,
Das Gott der Herr geschrieben
Ins große Stammbuch der Natur,
Als ihn der Geist getrieben.
Das ist kein abstraktes Begriffspoem!
Das Lied hat Fleisch und Rippen,
Hat Hand und Fuß; es lacht und küßt
Mit schöngereimten Lippen.
And now in a very inadequate translation,
The woman’s form is poetry
that God the Lord has written
upon the pages of Nature’s book
as Spirit his heart has smitten.
This is no abstract concept poem
It has flesh and hips
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
Has hand and foot; can laugh and kiss
With its well-rhymed lips!
What Heine so marvelously portrays is the incarnate beauty,
the poetry of God’s own creative work. This is no abstract concept
poem, a question of mere musing, for God’s Muse is the Creator
Spirit. Leonardo’s principle that words are not adequate to deeds and
that reality requires images collapses before this mystery of divine
art. The Lord’s Word is a deed, as Faust famously says at the beginning of Goethe’s poem. What God speaks comes to pass. He writes
history as men write texts, and it is so, as Auctor Scripturae, that he
brings the book to life in the spiritual sense.
The story of Pygmalion is, in a way, thus the story of Creation.
The Lord has loved his beautiful art to life, breathing into it his own
divinity, as the sculptor of Cyprus (with Aphrodite’s help) kissed human life into the ivory Galatea. This is not the sterile, superficial love
excited by Praxiteles’ Aphrodite, however, nor an exercise in the
narcissistic virtuosity of the artist. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of
his lips!” The Bride of the Song herself yearns for the breath proceeding from the Artist’s mouth.
This painful longing of the woman for the man is, quite significantly, first announced after the Fall, after her eyes have been opened
to desire and even concupiscence: “Your desire shall be for your man”
(Gen 3:16). In the wake of sin, the woman’s eyes and her desires,
are divinely redirected—no longer focused on the trees of the garden, but on the living image of God within creation. The woman,
of course, is all creation, for all creation is feminine before God.
Creation, like Eve under the curse outside the garden, like Israel in
exile, must search in pain for the Lord whom she desires: “I sought
him whom my soul loves. I sought him but did not find him” (Sg 3:1).
At the end of the Song, however, fallen creation’s desire is conspicuously, momentously reversed: she finds him and finds peace in his
eyes, and now “his desire is for me” (Sg 7:10, emphasis mine). This
signals a return to the prelapsarian state, where the man first longed
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to find his own image in creation. The Incarnation is situated at the
precise intersection of these crossing, mutual desires: the painful
yearning of the fallen world for God, and the love of God, which first
engendered creation, then again restored it to its innocence with this
same love.
Fabric Hadjadj, the French philosopher who converted to Catholicism from Judaism, says something wonderful, finally, in this
connection: “Literature, poetry, music, all the arts, are profoundly
rooted in the man’s cry of delight before the woman.” This cry of delight and affirmation is the cry of the Word through whom all things
were made as he looks on the beauty of his creation, finding there the
loveliness of his own image. “At last bone of my bone and flesh of my
flesh!” The Word is indeed a Demiurge, the “Master Craftsman” of
Proverbs 8:30, archetype of all the artisans of “sub-creation” (Tolkien). The human artist is the special image of this image-making Image, who incarnates this primal nuptial mystery, who builds a magic
mirror in which the fallen eyes of creation are finally opened to catch
a glimpse of the world—that means, ourselves as God’s own image—in the light of prelapsarian sight.
Notes
1. This paper was originally delivered as a lecture at the New York University Catholic
Center in Greenwich Village, New York, New York, as part of the Thomistic Institute’s series, “The Art of the Beautiful: The Effects of the Incarnation on Art” (December 5, 2015).
2. Notebooks §653–54.
3. See, e.g., Sermo 313a, 3.
4. This is a recurring theme in Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy. See also his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” preached at Oxford in 1942.
5. Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950).
6.Pseudo-Lucian, Erotica §15.
7. “La musique est seulement là pour parler . . . de ce dont la parole ne peut parler. En
ce sens, elle n’est pas tout a fait humaine” (Sainte Colombe, Tous les matins du monde,
Scene 120).
8. J. W. Cohoo, Dio Chrysostom: Discourses 1–11 (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1932).
iconoclasm, the incarnation, the aspiration of christian art
9. Koran 7.143.
10. Kenneth Clark nicely captures the inherent tension of the human form:
The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary
states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human
body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational
concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight
to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by
showing that the gods are like men and may be worshiped for their life-giving
beauty rather than their death-dealing powers. (The Nude: A Study in Ideal Art Form
[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1972])
11. Peter Brown, “A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Inconoclastic Controversy,” English
Historical Review 88 (1973): 1–34.
12. See John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Idea (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975).
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