"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

You can always spot me out of a crowd at the Menil Collection in Houston. I'm the one snickering at all the modern art and trying hopelessly to hold in my comments. However, the popular refrain from my fellow low-brows is that art is so difficult to define and, consequently, who are we to judge it? But this is a misnomer. Art is hardly something that can be mistaken for something else like Islam or football or a buffet dinner. It is simply pictorial representation. What people really mean is that good art is difficult to define. When I'm jeering at Dadaism or Cubism, I don't dismiss a painting of that school as not being art; I dismiss it as being déclassé and meretricious art. Admittedly, we are left with the conundrum that good art is hard to outline, and deciding whether a painting is "finished" is like pinning down a mess of shadows.

It is this shadiness that modern artists run with, often resulting in the most freakish of births, like free verse in poetry and hip-hop in music. These creations are illegitimate children at best, departing from both the dominant and recessive traits of their genres. For instance, free verse has virtually nothing to do with any of the rules of poetry anymore and God help me if I speak anymore of hip-hop.

But it is also this shadiness over what constitutes good art that many religious fundamentalists take umbrage with, using it as a soapbox to denounce the arts wholesale as slippery and suspect, corrupting the Athenian youth as it were. But then even artists and fundamentalists are often hard-pressed to define what is an "artist" or "fundamentalist." You see, the postmodern ploy today is to steal away definitions at the beginning so nothing can be argued and resolved. Let us escape the horns by plainly stating that art is pictorial representation, an artist is a maker of pictorial representation, and a fundamentalist is a person who takes the core of his beliefs quite literally and seriously. Those three terms then, let it be noted, are quite neutral in and of themselves. How they are used in context determines whether the connotation is complimentary or not. They are merely neutral containers, capable to be abused, but harmless enough as labels. Religious art, like icons, are much the same way, as will be seen.

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But if the visual arts suffer from being popularly cast as more shadow than substance, what of spirituality? Faith is often defined, rightly so, as the evidence of things unseen; it is based on the eternal, which is, conveniently enough, invisible. It takes supernatural eyes to even perceive spiritual truth, let alone define and apply it. It is not difficult then to imagine the confusion that results when art is crossed with religion.

Historically, when the question of what constitutes acceptable art has taken on the mantle of religious significance, violence has followed close behind. This should not take us unawares. After all, poetry is not so neat and flowery as to have always have been merely an academic question; some of the bloodiest riots in New York were over Shakespearean acting styles and anti-British sentiment in the 1849 Astor Place riot. And who could forget the Parisian uprising at Oscar Wilde's Salome or Nijinsky's/Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring? But the main polemic of the visual arts comes down to this: can the spiritual world, the holy if you will, be accurately portrayed in "a mess of shadows"? Or is that a just a subtler form of sacrilege to box God in and hang Him on a living room wall?

For now, we will approach the question philosophically, historically, biblically, and finally artistically. More than any other movement, early 19th century British Romanticism is known for having wrestled with the impact of art in our lives (and less so the ensuing American Romantics, Transcendentalists, and Existentialists, etc.). But most of that British impetus comes from the German Romantic movement and it is to Hegel that we now turn. In The Philosophy of Fine Art, he said, "the work of art has no such naïve and independent being. It is essentially a question, an address to the responding soul of man, an appeal to affections and intelligence."¹ His answer to that question was the infamous dialectic or conjunction of opposites. In short, the dialectic said for every thought or thesis, there is an anti-thought or antithesis. When those two theses have fought it out, there emerges a new synthesis. Hegel saw Romanticism and its transcendent view of the spirit as a solution to the older problems of classical views of art, but only a temporary one at that. In the future, you see, Romanticism itself will be part of yet another question, and so on and so forth.

Before we answer Hegel in considering whether art can ever truly be grounded and critiqued and enjoyed by any standard and lasting measurement, whether Romantic or otherwise, a little church-art history course is needed. Specifically, the Byzantine conflict (8th-9th centuries) and Protestant Reformation (14th-16th centuries) must be adumbrated. These two events contributed to the war over the bounds of art with the single word "iconoclasm", which literally means "image-breaking." That is, whatever was perceived to be sacrilegious imagery was simply torn down, burned up, or smashed.

Leggo My Icon

In the sixth century, the politically astute and morally errant Pope Gregory had the idea of the biblia pauperum, or the poor man's Bible whereby lay people could "hear" the Word from a stain glass representation (and by implication remain illiterate). However, Gregory's fundamentalist opponents took the Second Commandment and Deuteronomic exhortation to ban all graven images rather literally, holding to what John McGuckin calls "stark Judaeo-Christian attitudes to art, whereas in Byzantium the development of decoration and Christian symbolism had advanced considerably."²

Iconodules or "image-venerators" like Orthodox monks supported Pope Gregory against the iconoclasts. The most prominent iconodule was John of Damascus, who made the argument that reliquaries merely replaced the cherubim ornamentation and accoutrements found in Solomon's Temple as well as the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament. This is a common argument for icons that neglects the fact that those objects were adorned precisely because that was the tabernacle where God dwelt in the Old Covenant. In the New Covenant, He resides in the templed body of His followers via the Holy Spirit. Acts 17:29-30 stresses the dichotomy to the Greek mind: "Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent."

By the time of Emperor Leo III's iconoclastic order in 726, the debate became explosive. Leo had an apotropaic statue of Christ torn from the gates of the Chalke Imperial Palace in Constantinople. This caused an uproar among the iconodules who soon had it replaced. Thence, it was torn down and replaced frequently in the years to come and at the cost of many lives. Leo's son and successor, Constantine V, continued iconoclasm with the Council of Hiereia (754) until his orders were revoked by the Empress Irene and the Second Council of Nicaea (787).

Until that point, in a grisly foretaste of the socio-political rousings of the radical Protestant Thomas Munzer, Constantine's armies had razed the monasteries and killed the king-rejecting iconodule monks. McGuckin says these "purges" ended up as "an attempt to suppress the monastic state as such" and wipe out the individualist iconodules in the "cause of totalitarian tidiness."³ Whether the primary conflict was religious or political though, it continued into the next century as Empress Irene's orders were also overturned by Leo V, Michael II, and Theophilus. It was not until Empress Theodora, Theophilus' widow, that special veneration of icons was allowed in the compromise of 843. Complete statues were not allowed, but paintings were. This date is celebrated, ironically, as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

For the next six hundred years, the Roman Catholic machine was the giver and interpreter of what is today called the humanities, or what was then called the Seven Liberal Arts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (trivium) with arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music (quadrivium). On an older scale, the entire spectrum of the arts can the summarized by dance, drama, fine art, music, literature and rhetoric, and architecture. It is this older spectrum which concerns our purview, and especially the branch of fine art.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Aquinas was the collective spokesman for Catholicism. While Plato was a strong influence on medievals early on, Aquinas championed Aristotle's worldview and, for our immediate purposes, the side of the iconodules. He posited that icons draw one past the image and deeper to God. He also characteristically assorted a ranking system in which certain types of images can elevate one's devotion to a level over other types.⁴

By the time of the Protestant and Peasant Revolutions in 16th century Germany, especially around Thurigia, the ghost of the literal apostolic gospel had returned. Protestantism, especially among the Anabaptists, took a fundamentalist view of Scripture and, for our purposes, especially the Second Commandment. Soon, this gospel toppled the caesarian clergy and came to equate all believers in a resurrected light, partly by cleansing the temples of the modern day money-changers. Relics, shrines and other catchpenny paraphernalia abounded since the early days of the church and one might say it was time for some outsourced oversighting. The 1529 Basel riots were just another instance in which iconoclasm showed its violent Byzantine bent. Roodscreens and crucifixes were tore up, but so were the stone and tapestries of the churches looted for profit. Elsewhere, the Muslims had enacted this mandate with a particular zealotry. Like young King Josiah, their rulers have torn up the Asherah poles, but to see Western Christians waging a crusade in the backyard of Germany and England was something else.

Understanding Iconoclasts

Humanists like McGuckin believe that in both these Byzantine and Protestant periods, the iconoclasts believed "older means more authentic" while the iconodules synthesized "living tradition."⁵ However, theory and practice are not so simple as that. Iconodules generally have a more optimistic view of man and his artistic talents, even if in practice Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism have divorced themselves from the physical world through convents and monasteries. This is a great conundrum since Protestants, who are supposed to have leveled the chancel and nave so the priesthood is for all believers (at least personally if not institutionally), have often lost themselves from evangelical work. Instead, in becoming so absorbed in a future understanding of the City of God, they have formed their own cloisters and let the here-and-now suffer from the gates of Hell.

This misunderstood duality is the root of all sorts of evil and confusion for Christian behavior. It is one of the chief reasons why Protestants in America have forfeited any claim to affect the political sphere. While we should be skeptical of human behavior and well aware of mankind's depravity, Protestants should not be hindered by any futurist dispensational theology in spreading the word of the cross. The Kingdom of God is among you, the Gospel shouts, and will not depart from working in those who are being saved, even unto the end of the age.

It would be easy to say that iconoclastic Protestantism results from a Platonic distrust of the senses and indeed all of material, carnal reality. But this tendency would also suppose that every conservative reaction (i.e., reformation) is necessarily an over-reaction and point to the marks of bloodshed as evident of this. But is this a fair argument? If seen as the fruit to such movements, such bloodshed goes against the Christian tenet of the spiritual sword. In the Books of Acts, crowds are zealously led to pyre their own stashes of occult literature in penitence; it is not a scene of Paul torching the heretics in an Inquisition. The Scripture's medicine for heretics is sound doctrine and cessation of fellowship. If Protestants do not practice as much, well, by their fruits we shall know them.

Also, in declaiming any conservative movements in the arts, critics of iconoclasm all too often discard the Platonic schema for spiritual things entirely and adopt Aristotle as their scientific father. A steady balance among these two watershed worldviews is needed. Indeed, the concept of such a middle balance or golden mean is itself from Aristotle's Ethics.

I do not wish to be misunderstood; I am a thorough-going Platonist Christian. The duality of Plato is not an unnecessary one to me as it was to Aristotle. However, Plato's application must be carefully guarded through Christian discernment. Another article may justify Plato's relevance to earthly concerns in light of the activist book of Hebrews and Augustine's City of God, but for now the second major stumbling block for iconodules is the related to the first. We have seen that iconoclasts do not abhor the physical and do not have their head in the clouds. They also are not blind to the way metaphor works, to the relationship between icon and allegory, and unable to distinguish between the poem-as-herald expressing its tale of "truth" from the Truth itself.

This is the person who superficially reads The Screwtape Letters and declares it demonic. Sir Phillip Sidney ridiculed those who believed Aesop's Fables is a factual account, instead of the "feigned image of poesy."⁶ It is obvious that literature is largely about "things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written."⁷ More than any other book, the Bible explodes with divine metaphor and interconnected typology. In it, we find both the call to spiritual battle again the powers of darkness (i.e., temple cleansing) and the ethic of nonviolence. The path of bloodshed is a third way many take, but does not follow from the Scriptures.

Finally, the dualism that leads literary critics, unjustly appellated as "puritanical", to condemn all poetry and painting is not found in the actions of men like Leo III and Luther. Their heightened theology may lend itself towards asceticism more than their Catholic counterparts, but the utter denial of the physical is never an option. Otherwise, the church building itself would be seen as idolatrous by attempting to confine God's omnipresence within walls and to one location instead of within each believer. Indeed, we do not actually go to church; we are the church.

The route Luther's progenitors have taken is claiming that the most inimical icon is a nation that claims with the mouth to fear God, but in practice no such thing. This is Israel through the prophets until Christ and Christendom for much of the Middle Ages until Luther. More recently, it depicts Denmark until Kierkegaard and today's passive-service program churches until us. The solution is for them to be shattered from within.

The Mojo of the Second Commandment

Gerardus van der Leeuw in Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, regards the artistic shortcomings of religious men and the religious shortcomings of artists, showing how primitive man does not have this disassociation of sensibilities. By primitive, he does not mean aboriginal, but a state of the imagination where the mind is yet undivided and art is integrally bound up with the holy, when "song was prayer, drama was divine performance, dance was cult."⁸ It is similar to a kind of holy play, where pagans revel and delight in what they only dimly see, things that children still intuitively know. There was no distinction between the natural and supernatural. This does not mean however that primitives all held sound in Christological doctrine. "What the domain of religion gains among them, it loses in depth."⁹

Van der Leeuw goes on to say of representational art that its danger lies in the fact that "it binds the free imagination. It leaves no scope above what is represented . . . It has left out the most important thing, the hint of the invisible . . . it exhausts itself in the actuality of the object." He continues, "from the point of view of primitive religion, a coarse piece of wood [and] a geometrical drawing are images, for they partake of the nature of that they point to . . . The religions of the oldest periods of Rome, Israel, and Islam share this aversion to the human . . . It is possible for faith to prefer the ugly to the beautiful because a conventional image better preserves the distance which separates the holy than does the individual vision of the artist."¹⁰ We know nothing of Christ's facial appearance, but that He was not comely that anyone should want to look upon Him. You might say He was as average-looking as a coarse piece of wood.

When the Greeks first brought the idea of the human image as literally representative of God, more than aesthetic demeaning came into play. Van der Leeuw explains, "the bond between what is represented is not realistic, but magical. In the image, in the representation, the creature is contained, no matter how little outward similarity it evidences with the thing represented."¹¹ The background of the Second Commandment involves the summoning and conjuring aspect of magic. We forget that back then a huge issue was that Yahweh could not be controlled by a voodoo doll.

J. I. Packer believes the "anything" referred to in the highly neglected Second Commandment also includes mental images of God, echoing the Reformed belief that the depraved imagination is too suspect to "reproduce" God or the holy by human hands. Aristotelians who feel safe in their fancies and dreamings, Packer says, should employ their creativity towards "appreciating the drama and marvel of God's historical doings, as is done in the Prophets and the Psalms and the books of Revelation, rather than fly in the face of the Second Commandment by constructing static and seemingly representational images of him."¹² Even Sidney, that would be iconodule, confesses to an "erected wit" but an "infected will."¹³ This confession of Sidney is not a depreciation of all the literary aspirations of a fallen world, but an indictment against the pride of forging great works of art worthy of God's image.

The Bible stresses God's voice over His signs, inward obedience rather than outward glamour. Unfortunately this can potentially amount to pirating Plato and evicting all religious symbolists so the arts are sent into exile outside the camp. Instead of this misguided temple cleansing, we need deeper extrapolations and renewed reverence for the Decalogue. Let us come to a middle way even as God has done with us, without having once lowered or emptied the status of His Standard, His own Son.

A Colorless Christianity

While mankind is fallen, the arts, which are God's, do not also have to suffer to the point of being burned as chaff and stubble. Here the intention of the image goes far in proving its case for existence. If the haloed saint is diverting worshippers away from God and God alone, that image's life is forfeit and we ought to grab our maces (ahem, those of us who own them). It would be better for the image to seek asylum in a museum than in a church. Of course, these days it is hard to tell one from the other.

In commenting on a passage of Milton, Lana Cable asserts, "The truth or falsity that is actually tested … is not that of the idol itself, but of the idolaters, whose purposes define the artifact."¹⁴ She touches on the issue of intent or the motivation of the artist. There is a line, albeit rather blurry, between "nude" studies in an art course and "nakedness" found in pornography. In terms of icons the comparison might be made between a picture of St. Elmo and a bust of Montaigne, whose French charisma, captivating as it might be, has never led to a desperate prayer of worship or healing. The saint-picture and the sculpture are of two divergent types of veneration: one is profaned for being prayed to; the other exists out of mere pleasure but nothing approaching the veneration of Elmo. In novels and the very nature of language, profanity can be seen as taking serious words lightly. Idolatry then consists in taking sacrosanct ideas sacrilegiously. It is not enough to serve God in form without the content. Ergo, if four-letter words are allowed in a goodly application of context, then icons may also exist with their proper context of attitude. If there is no room for obscenity or profanity then the same criteria applies to icons.

Unlike doctrine, art has the ability of some prejudice, like holding a superstition in shades of gray. Such fairy-tale like suspension of disbelief is valuable to the spiritual outlook of a people. Holding doctrine in black and white is orthodoxy; holding prejudice in black and white is legalism. But even a pretty doctrine of white can be deficient without its images and perfumes with which to beautify the feet of Jesus as He beautifies His bride. To neglect colors and grandeur with the concern of giving all to the poor can be just as sad as a cathedral with all the decking and no one inside. As John Stackhouse once said, this is "the heresy of an un-beautiful Christianity."¹⁵

Therefore the form of the question of art itself is wrong-headed. It has focused on form and encasing the infinite, when it should be about the content. As we have said in other articles, the man is more important than his raiment. This is not to say the form is not disputed, for surely iconodules broach heresy in suggesting "the image restricts God no more than the body of Christ restricts the Logos who dwells within it."¹⁶

A Christian corrective to this can be seen in the Caedmon's Call song "Not Enough." The lyrics relate in wonderful Greek allusions to the shortcomings of the arts:

Getting back to Hegel, perhaps religion should be approached like a child, led along by symbols and parables until it is time to be one's own priest and put away childish things. The Old Covenant, in the period of the symbolic type of art, taught God could not be represented but by a picture like the Temple or the Ark. Hegel goes on to explain how once Christ took on the form of flesh and indwelt the temple of each believer, classical sculpture became the icon suitable for this revelation. Finally, after invading the four walls and the human eye, the art of God can actually now be realized in the Romantic revelation of poetry, the "inner chamber of the spirit."¹⁷ Poetry is the most complete art, synthesizing the rhythm of music and sensuousness of painting. The mature believer therefore cannot possibly cast down a fine painting, if its intentions are noble, for it is the not only able to contain the Godhead, but also one of the highest forms of spiritual abstraction and subjection freedom. That was Hegel's view, but van der Leeuw clearly has shown that magical dangers to such confidence in artistic representation.

Deconstructionist movements that cut out any symbolic catch phrases like "freedom," "patriotism," and "honor," throw the baby out with the bath water. Expatriates like Hemmingway and Fitzgerald knew such subjective terms could be misleading because of how vague and shadowy they could be in the mouths of politicians. Unfortunately, they neglected the positive value of such symbols and the verbal imagery behind them. Hegel on the other hand was too optimistic, and did not mention that spirituality could take dark faces as well as light. Historically we know that as the fragmented nature of Romantic thought screamed forth out of its box, the mirror of the human soul can be a frightful thing. Just ask Hawthorne or Poe.

"Iconoclasm's nemesis is not its ostensible enemy, images per se, but rather the disturbing possibility - to many impermissible - that ideas may themselves be nothing more than projected images."¹⁸ Iconoclasm fights to proclaim there is an idea beyond the image, a spirit beyond the body. In other words, to Hegel's horror, when undisciplined by the spiritual, art is but a hollow questioning without an answer.

Van der Leeuw summarized, "Religious nature of art is not conditioned by its subject, but by its purpose, by its character."¹⁹ It is not the form of the icon, as important as that may be, but the fragile content of the holy that is at stake (remember what happened to Uzzah when he merely touched the Ark?).

Therefore, those iconoclasts who would hold to the absolution of all misused religious images do not find the physical to be anathema. Their quarrel is directed against the abuses and arrogance of man's unregenerate mind. Yet grace is sufficient to mold such marred vessels for glory. The problem is not concreteness, but sinfulness, for van der Leeuw says, "sin destroys both spirit and matter." The Greeks thought the flaw lay in dead matter and salvation in the living spirit, but Christians see the flaw in the spirit too. They recognize that salvation is only in God and His grace is made perfect in weakness.

1. qtd. in Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (1992) 535b.
2. John McGuckin, "The Theology of Images and the Legitimation of Power in Eighth Century Byzantium," Saint Vladmir's Theological Quarterly (1993) 43.
3. Ibid. 46, 58.
4. The Image and the Word: Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ed. Joseph Gutmann. (1977) 84-85.
5. McGuckin, 44.
6. Adams, 148b.
7. Ibid, 154a.
8. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (1963) 11.
9. Ibid, 35.
10. Ibid, 164.
11. Ibid, 169.
12. J.I. Packer, Knowing God. (1993) 51.
13. Adams, 145b.
14. Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (1995) 159.
15. John Stackhouse, "The True, the Good, and the Beautiful Christian," Christianity Today (2002) 61.
16. McGuckin, 51.
17. Adams, 540a.
18. Cable, 19.
19. van der Leeuw, 157.

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