“Stop reading Calvin.” This was my curt response to an earnest and intelligent undergraduate student at Wheaton working on a thesis on art and religion. She and I had spent an hour talking over coffee and on our way back to the philosophy department she said something to the effect of,“Well, I need to reconcile all this with Calvin.”
God in the Gallery is by no means a polemic against Calvin. Calvinism, neo-Calvinism, and the Reformed tradition as a whole were immensely helpful as I sought a coherent intellectual and theological justification for my belief in Christianity and my participation in culture as an art writer. However, when it came to the challenge of articulating my particular aesthetic experience of particular works of modern and contemporary art, of actually doing the work of an art critic, I found them of little help. Calvin and Calvinism might offer a general “theory” or “theology” of culture in the abstract, but culture doesn’t exist in the abstract. It operates at the level of the concrete, the specific. My primary goal as an art critic, curator, and art historian is not to provide aesthetic or artistic refinements to a Calvinist or Reformed worldview or theology of culture but to offer provocative and compelling articulations of my experience with particular works of modern and contemporary art and to do so with all the resources I have as a Christian. The inability of Calvin and his descendants to offer much help is not what I had expected. Yet I remain profoundly shaped by the Reformed eagerness and willingness to engage contemporary culture in and through Christ. This, I must admit, is often lacking in other traditions, like the Lutheran and Eastern Orthodox, which I hold most dear.
If not Calvin, where? The place to start is with the seventh ecumenical council, Nicaea II (787). It is the undivided church’s view of the aesthetic image through a Christological lens. It did not merely allow for the use of icons, it mandated them as the natural outgrowth of the catholic and orthodox Christian doctrine initially formulated at Nicaea I in 325 and finished at Constantinople in 381. “Nicene Christianity” was further clarified at Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople I (553), and Constantinople II (681). Nicaea II was not a “special arts council” of the Church, a kind of “arts and worship” after-conference that brought together some creative types to muse about how to use the arts in worship. Many of the bishops who attended the council bore on their very bodies, as living icons, the marks of mutilation at the hands of Imperial iconoclasm. The bishops considered their re-affirmation of the veneration of icons to be the outgrowth and summation of a Trinitarian and Christological teaching of the previous six councils, making explicit what had always already been a part of the faith and practice of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. They were convinced that the veneration of icons was implied in the Creed itself.
The problem, however, is that Nicaea II is usually considered “merely” an Eastern Orthodox council, a kind of sectarian teaching on how the Eastern Orthodox use art for worship. When the theology of icons and Nicaea II come up in my conversations with Protestants about God in the Gallery, my cultured and sophisticated “ancient-future” postmodern believers tend to close up ecumenical shop and go home. The assumption is that Nicaea II isn’t for Protestants. Granted, its acceptance in the West took a while, but that was not because the Latin West was “iconoclastic.” And it was indeed poorly understood and perhaps even largely unknown to the sixteenth century Reformers. But those barriers no longer exist. The only barrier for contemporary Protestants that remains is a lack of aesthetic and theological imagination.
French phenomenologist and Roman Catholic Jean-Luc Marion wrote somewhere that the contemporary crisis of the image will be rectified only by recovering the insights of Nicaea II. The contemporary crisis of the image is a cultural phenomenon. Yet Marion regards the work of the Church as the primary important instrument for contemporary cultural criticism. Nicaea II is not a peculiar artifact of Eastern Orthodoxy. It is a fundamental part of the inheritance of the Church. And as such we can enjoy its riches. Formed in the crucible of Eastern Church in the eighth and ninth centuries, it is perhaps Byzantium's most precious gift to the universal Church and to each disciple of Christ.
And like the other great dogmatic Trinitarian and Incarnational articulations and elaborations of the Nicene Faith, the depth and breadth of Nicaea II sloshes and spills out of the Church’s container to nourish all of human cultural practice. If Erich Auerbach in his magisterial study of representation, Mimesis (1946), could argue that the doctrine of the Incarnation had revolutionized Western art and literature, how much more can Nicaea II and the texts of its two most brilliant apologists, St. John of Damascus (676-749) and St. Theodore of Stoudios (759-826), contribute to the work of contemporary analysis of the image, including contemporary artistic practice?
So, how might Protestants begin, ever so carefully, to think about Nicaea II as a useful resource for cultural practice?
First, Nicaea II reveals the inextricable relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Fr. Alexander Schmemann, the great Orthodox liturgical theologian, once said, echoing the Fathers, that a Christian is one who sees Christ everywhere. This statement is inconceivable without Nicaea II, without the notion that we must learn to see the world through the eyes of faith; through the Passion of Christ; through the world transformed by the presence of the kingdom of God. And to see everything as an icon of God and thus to see Christ, the ultimate and prototypical icon of God, everywhere. Icons are thus specific aesthetic articulations of an ethical comportment toward God and his creation. How can we see the face of Christ shining in the faces of those we see on a daily basis unless our vision is trained by the veneration of icons or images, or works of art?
Second, it reveals that we are all, as fallen human beings, iconoclasts. We delight in destroying each others’ images, sacred spaces, and cherished beliefs. And there is no doubt a time, authorized by God and exemplified in the Scriptures, for a healthy iconoclasm. Yet this sacred iconoclastic irreverence must be grounded and stabilized by a profound reverence for and veneration of icons. This does not mean that one must be Eastern Orthodox, or have an icon corner at home. But it does mean that the theological foundation that underwrites the theology of the icon is acknowledged as a general orientation toward material embodiment of nature and culture as transformed through the Passion of Christ. The Eastern Church gave Christendom the theology of icons. Perhaps it will be those culturally engaged Protestants, formed by the Reformed tradition, who will extend, elaborate, and otherwise develop it into a rich engagement with contemporary artistic practice.
But that is getting ahead of ourselves. For now, the most important thing that Nicaea II provides Protestants is negative. It places limits to our fallen human iconoclasm, which, if left unchecked, will destroy everything simply for the sake of an insatiable lust for iconoclasm, which will ultimately end in denying the Incarnation and refusing the grace of the Resurrection. Luther knew this, however imperfectly, when he had to return to Wittenberg to rail against the violent iconoclasm of his successor, Andreas Karlstadt. The iconoclasts’ hammer, as art historian Leo Joseph Koerner observes, “always swings sideways.” To those Christians who want to take modern and contemporary art seriously, to form a close and abiding relationship with it, to participate in its practices, put down your copy of Calvin’s Institutes.
And pick up St. John of Damascus’s Three Treatises on the Divine Images.
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