ON THE SHELF
Three New Titles in Theology and the Arts
Three New Titles in Theology and the Arts
by Mark McInroy
In every issue, book review editor Mark McInroy supplies notes on books recently released in theology and the arts. He is an associate professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, and has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2014), and was a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.
Natalie Carnes, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford, 2018)
This remarkable study takes as its point of departure Carnes’s subtle, perceptive claim that images contain an “iconoclastic structure” within themselves. That is, images negate themselves in that they mediate a presence that lies elsewhere; the imaged is not the image itself. Therefore, internal to the image is a logic according to which the image must be “broken open to mediate a presence beyond it” (6). The image, however, is not illusory or inconsequential (as a “degenerate version of Platonism” might have it), but is instead the site in which a complex form of presence can be discerned. There is, then, a “strange intertwining” in the image between presence and absence that merits close scrutiny, and Carnes provides an exceptionally creative exploration of this interplay throughout the volume’s five chapters.
Chapter 1, “Born of the Virgin Mary: Arriving Presence,” advances as its central argument the notion that “the Christ born of the Virgin Mary summons and negates—without eradicating—a literal desire, which then becomes more than literal” (22). Carnes organizes much of her inquiry around various artistic depictions of the Maria lactans, which displays Mary’s exposed breast as she feeds the Christ child. To Carnes, these images suggest that “Christ comes to us amidst literal desire and to deny those desires—to deny the Mother who was the first object of those desires—is to deny the full reality of the incarnation and undermine the hope of salvation” (33). The Modern West catechizes its adherents into “images of critique” (according to which desire is kept at bay through the insistence that images have no power) and simultaneously “images of consumption” (according to which desire is “literalized” as one attempts to possess the imaged, as in pornography and advertising). Carnes, however, recommends a form of desire experienced in Maria lactans, in which the object is not consumed but accepted in its separateness, and literal desire opens up to the “non-literal.” To Carnes, “In this acceptance, in this mode of image relationship, we can receive a grace of divine presence” (53).
Chapter 2, “Came Down from Heaven and Was Made Human: Abiding Presence,” brings Byzantine debates about images of Christ into conversation with the writing of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, an unlikely choice of interlocutors Carnes explains by claiming that all share a logic of “amphibiousness”: Christ is divine-human, the human is animal-spirit, and the image is visible-invisible (58). To be amphibious in this understanding is to exclude neither pole of one’s natural habitat, so to speak, which in the case of images means that they “are present in and make present to this world” (i.e., their significance is not wholly otherworldly, in the signified that lies beyond), and they also “underscore the absence of that which they make present” (i.e., they are not exclusively this-worldly, exhausted on the horizontal plane) (75).
Chapter 3, “Crucified, Died, and Was Buried: Riven and Riving Presence,” stands at the nadir of Carnes’s Christological sojourn, and some of her most profound claims are located in this portion of her book. The chapter centers on the cross, on which Christ is “riven,” but also “rives.” “He rives the power of sin, destroying its dominion over humanity” (88–89). Although at one level the cross is the site where the Image is broken, then, that very brokenness and the “breakingness” that ensues (i.e., the destruction of sin’s dominion) becomes to Carnes “God’s central image in God’s life with what is not God, the fulcrum of gathering and turning for images that present the divine” (92). The lesson carries over to iconoclasm itself, which in its most extreme form attempts to destroy even the cross, yet in so doing “simply generates further crosses” (114), as the destruction itself becomes an image. To Carnes, therefore, “The cross is fecund, bearing its cross children into the world that we might see the cross everywhere in the universe” (115).
Chapter 4, “Rose Again on the Third Day: Abiding Presence,” begins with the observation that the moment of the resurrection is not depicted in the main current of the Byzantine iconographic tradition. To Carnes this indicates that Christ’s “abiding” after the resurrection takes a new form, distinct from the abiding inaugurated with Christ’s birth. The implications of this transformed abiding for icons begin with the following: “In the crucifixion, the Image crosses a measureless abyss … between his appearance and his glory, thus killing any logic of resemblance for divine imaging. The risen Christ has passed through this abyss and comes through it unrecognizable to his friends” (123). On the basis of this terminated logic of resemblance, Carnes goes on to insist that the icon’s significance does not depend on it looking like the person depicted. Instead, what is important is that “the hypostasis of Christ … mercifully appropriates the likeness of the icon, and so identifies with it, becoming uniquely present to it” (128); as a result of this condescending grace, there is a “suturing to the invisible that makes the icon what it is” (132).
Chapter 5, “Will Come Again in Glory: Arriving Presence,” returns to the non-literal desire treated in Chapter 1, and here Carnes expresses concern that non-literal desire, like literal desire, can betray divine desire, as non-literal desire too can remain mired in the world and fail to reach God. Non-literal desire, then, must also be negated so as to be open to the divine, and Carnes sees iconoclasms of fidelity as integral to this process. Rather than “Baconian iconoclasm,” which seeks to displace idols with (scientific) truth, Carnes recommends some features of what she calls “Wittgensteinian iconoclasm,” which adds image after image in an effort at loosening the grip a particular image has on us. This “everlasting image cascade” is enabled by desire for Christ, which itself is a response to Christ’s desire for us, and which ultimately allows one to see the entire creation as an image of God.
Carnes not only gives new expression to established theological claims by nimbly interweaving traditional and contemporary sources, she creatively voyages into new theological territory at many moments in her study, and constructive theologians should take note.
This remarkable study takes as its point of departure Carnes’s subtle, perceptive claim that images contain an “iconoclastic structure” within themselves. That is, images negate themselves in that they mediate a presence that lies elsewhere; the imaged is not the image itself. Therefore, internal to the image is a logic according to which the image must be “broken open to mediate a presence beyond it” (6). The image, however, is not illusory or inconsequential (as a “degenerate version of Platonism” might have it), but is instead the site in which a complex form of presence can be discerned. There is, then, a “strange intertwining” in the image between presence and absence that merits close scrutiny, and Carnes provides an exceptionally creative exploration of this interplay throughout the volume’s five chapters.
Chapter 1, “Born of the Virgin Mary: Arriving Presence,” advances as its central argument the notion that “the Christ born of the Virgin Mary summons and negates—without eradicating—a literal desire, which then becomes more than literal” (22). Carnes organizes much of her inquiry around various artistic depictions of the Maria lactans, which displays Mary’s exposed breast as she feeds the Christ child. To Carnes, these images suggest that “Christ comes to us amidst literal desire and to deny those desires—to deny the Mother who was the first object of those desires—is to deny the full reality of the incarnation and undermine the hope of salvation” (33). The Modern West catechizes its adherents into “images of critique” (according to which desire is kept at bay through the insistence that images have no power) and simultaneously “images of consumption” (according to which desire is “literalized” as one attempts to possess the imaged, as in pornography and advertising). Carnes, however, recommends a form of desire experienced in Maria lactans, in which the object is not consumed but accepted in its separateness, and literal desire opens up to the “non-literal.” To Carnes, “In this acceptance, in this mode of image relationship, we can receive a grace of divine presence” (53).
Chapter 2, “Came Down from Heaven and Was Made Human: Abiding Presence,” brings Byzantine debates about images of Christ into conversation with the writing of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, an unlikely choice of interlocutors Carnes explains by claiming that all share a logic of “amphibiousness”: Christ is divine-human, the human is animal-spirit, and the image is visible-invisible (58). To be amphibious in this understanding is to exclude neither pole of one’s natural habitat, so to speak, which in the case of images means that they “are present in and make present to this world” (i.e., their significance is not wholly otherworldly, in the signified that lies beyond), and they also “underscore the absence of that which they make present” (i.e., they are not exclusively this-worldly, exhausted on the horizontal plane) (75).
Chapter 3, “Crucified, Died, and Was Buried: Riven and Riving Presence,” stands at the nadir of Carnes’s Christological sojourn, and some of her most profound claims are located in this portion of her book. The chapter centers on the cross, on which Christ is “riven,” but also “rives.” “He rives the power of sin, destroying its dominion over humanity” (88–89). Although at one level the cross is the site where the Image is broken, then, that very brokenness and the “breakingness” that ensues (i.e., the destruction of sin’s dominion) becomes to Carnes “God’s central image in God’s life with what is not God, the fulcrum of gathering and turning for images that present the divine” (92). The lesson carries over to iconoclasm itself, which in its most extreme form attempts to destroy even the cross, yet in so doing “simply generates further crosses” (114), as the destruction itself becomes an image. To Carnes, therefore, “The cross is fecund, bearing its cross children into the world that we might see the cross everywhere in the universe” (115).
Chapter 4, “Rose Again on the Third Day: Abiding Presence,” begins with the observation that the moment of the resurrection is not depicted in the main current of the Byzantine iconographic tradition. To Carnes this indicates that Christ’s “abiding” after the resurrection takes a new form, distinct from the abiding inaugurated with Christ’s birth. The implications of this transformed abiding for icons begin with the following: “In the crucifixion, the Image crosses a measureless abyss … between his appearance and his glory, thus killing any logic of resemblance for divine imaging. The risen Christ has passed through this abyss and comes through it unrecognizable to his friends” (123). On the basis of this terminated logic of resemblance, Carnes goes on to insist that the icon’s significance does not depend on it looking like the person depicted. Instead, what is important is that “the hypostasis of Christ … mercifully appropriates the likeness of the icon, and so identifies with it, becoming uniquely present to it” (128); as a result of this condescending grace, there is a “suturing to the invisible that makes the icon what it is” (132).
Chapter 5, “Will Come Again in Glory: Arriving Presence,” returns to the non-literal desire treated in Chapter 1, and here Carnes expresses concern that non-literal desire, like literal desire, can betray divine desire, as non-literal desire too can remain mired in the world and fail to reach God. Non-literal desire, then, must also be negated so as to be open to the divine, and Carnes sees iconoclasms of fidelity as integral to this process. Rather than “Baconian iconoclasm,” which seeks to displace idols with (scientific) truth, Carnes recommends some features of what she calls “Wittgensteinian iconoclasm,” which adds image after image in an effort at loosening the grip a particular image has on us. This “everlasting image cascade” is enabled by desire for Christ, which itself is a response to Christ’s desire for us, and which ultimately allows one to see the entire creation as an image of God.
Carnes not only gives new expression to established theological claims by nimbly interweaving traditional and contemporary sources, she creatively voyages into new theological territory at many moments in her study, and constructive theologians should take note.
William A. Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
William A. Dyrness begins this deeply informed and carefully argued volume with the observation that in the contemporary art scene “no object in the world . . . is considered out of bounds or banned from possible aesthetic attention” (1), and he proposes that this broadened field of aesthetic interest should be viewed as the outworking of a sensibility established during the Protestant Reformation. Specifically, Dyrness argues that Reformation figures and their followers expanded the arena in which God was understood to be present to the point that the world as a whole became a setting in which God’s glory was thought to be on display. In stating his claim in this way, Dyrness resists a common understanding of the Reformation according to which Protestantism unleashed incipient secularization on Western societies.
The volume’s first chapter and introduction, subtitled “The Medieval Context of the Reformation,” makes clear that the process he describes had already begun in the medieval period; there is no sharp break nor radical discontinuity between late medieval Catholicism and the Reformation. In Bonaventure’s doctrine of the spiritual senses, for instance, one observes an expansion of the possibilities for aesthetic contemplation of God, and the Franciscan call to become “little Christs,” along with Thomas à Kempis’s appeal to imitate Christ ultimately made possible “new ways of ‘seeing’ and responding to the breadth and depth of the natural order” (18).
Chapter 2, “Presence and Likeness in Holbein, Luther, and Cranach,” maintains that the paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger and Lucas Cranach the Elder broadened the range of possible responses to art in the early sixteenth century. Especially helpful here is a reinterpretation of Cranach’s work, which is often seen as submitting imagery to Luther’s “spiritual” interpretation. Dyrness insists that images are not belittled in this move, as is often thought. Instead, they prompt the viewer to “interrogate her own response to the image, to be involved in the story the image recounts” (50).
Chapter 3, “Calvin: Creation, Drama, and Time,” argues that Calvin reconfigured ritual, particularly the Lord’s Supper, in ways that pushed Christians outward into the world. To Dyrness, Calvin’s teaching on devotional and liturgical practice reveals that, whereas the medieval practices were meant “to integrate believers into the timeless and eternally recurring event,” Calvin directs one instead to “the Christian’s ongoing life in the world” (81).
Chapter 4, “Calvin, Language, and Literary Culture,” focuses on the role played by language in the dramatic possibilities opened up by Calvin’s thought. Dyrness explains that, to Calvin, “Dramatic movement was centrifugal rather than centripetal; the impulse was horizontal rather than vertical. And in the performance of worship—preaching, teaching, corporate singing—he was seeking to project a world in which congregants were called to fresh responsibility” (109–10). This outward movement into the world, however, has a mixed legacy, as it “eliminated particular places where that presence [of God] was clearly visible,” and in the wake of Calvin, “no particular place is privileged or special” (111).
Chapter 5, “Portraits and Dramatic Culture in Sixteenth-Century England,” centers on portraits of Elizabeth I and the imperial cult of sorts in which they were used. Dyrness claims that, in spite of the fact that images had been banned from churches and books in Elizabethan England, “visual display has been reinstated to its role of representing the truth” (128). The shift, however, is that “now the truth is the glory of Elizabeth and the English nation” (128). Dyrness goes on to suggest that this rise of images in the political arena was actually facilitated by the elimination of images from religious spaces, as “an imaginative vacuum was left that the cult of Elizabeth was called on to fill” (135).
Chapter 6, “The Emerging Aesthetic of Early Modern England: A New World with Echoes of the Past,” explores the role of the Calvinist religious framework in the rise of Renaissance theater, lyrical poetry, and music in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Chapter, 7, “The New Visual Culture of Reformed Holland and France,” argues that Calvin’s Institutes articulated a “programmatic structure for life in the world” that pushed Calvin’s followers “out of the church to live . . . this divine drama in their everyday life” (168).
The eighth chapter and epilogue, subtitled “The Cultural Afterlife of Protestant Aesthetics,” briefly sketches the influence of the Calvinist tradition on North American landscape painting and the ecological movement, among other things, and the epilogue concludes with reflections on the legacy of iconoclasm and the disenchantment of the world often linked to Protestantism.
William A. Dyrness begins this deeply informed and carefully argued volume with the observation that in the contemporary art scene “no object in the world . . . is considered out of bounds or banned from possible aesthetic attention” (1), and he proposes that this broadened field of aesthetic interest should be viewed as the outworking of a sensibility established during the Protestant Reformation. Specifically, Dyrness argues that Reformation figures and their followers expanded the arena in which God was understood to be present to the point that the world as a whole became a setting in which God’s glory was thought to be on display. In stating his claim in this way, Dyrness resists a common understanding of the Reformation according to which Protestantism unleashed incipient secularization on Western societies.
The volume’s first chapter and introduction, subtitled “The Medieval Context of the Reformation,” makes clear that the process he describes had already begun in the medieval period; there is no sharp break nor radical discontinuity between late medieval Catholicism and the Reformation. In Bonaventure’s doctrine of the spiritual senses, for instance, one observes an expansion of the possibilities for aesthetic contemplation of God, and the Franciscan call to become “little Christs,” along with Thomas à Kempis’s appeal to imitate Christ ultimately made possible “new ways of ‘seeing’ and responding to the breadth and depth of the natural order” (18).
Chapter 2, “Presence and Likeness in Holbein, Luther, and Cranach,” maintains that the paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger and Lucas Cranach the Elder broadened the range of possible responses to art in the early sixteenth century. Especially helpful here is a reinterpretation of Cranach’s work, which is often seen as submitting imagery to Luther’s “spiritual” interpretation. Dyrness insists that images are not belittled in this move, as is often thought. Instead, they prompt the viewer to “interrogate her own response to the image, to be involved in the story the image recounts” (50).
Chapter 3, “Calvin: Creation, Drama, and Time,” argues that Calvin reconfigured ritual, particularly the Lord’s Supper, in ways that pushed Christians outward into the world. To Dyrness, Calvin’s teaching on devotional and liturgical practice reveals that, whereas the medieval practices were meant “to integrate believers into the timeless and eternally recurring event,” Calvin directs one instead to “the Christian’s ongoing life in the world” (81).
Chapter 4, “Calvin, Language, and Literary Culture,” focuses on the role played by language in the dramatic possibilities opened up by Calvin’s thought. Dyrness explains that, to Calvin, “Dramatic movement was centrifugal rather than centripetal; the impulse was horizontal rather than vertical. And in the performance of worship—preaching, teaching, corporate singing—he was seeking to project a world in which congregants were called to fresh responsibility” (109–10). This outward movement into the world, however, has a mixed legacy, as it “eliminated particular places where that presence [of God] was clearly visible,” and in the wake of Calvin, “no particular place is privileged or special” (111).
Chapter 5, “Portraits and Dramatic Culture in Sixteenth-Century England,” centers on portraits of Elizabeth I and the imperial cult of sorts in which they were used. Dyrness claims that, in spite of the fact that images had been banned from churches and books in Elizabethan England, “visual display has been reinstated to its role of representing the truth” (128). The shift, however, is that “now the truth is the glory of Elizabeth and the English nation” (128). Dyrness goes on to suggest that this rise of images in the political arena was actually facilitated by the elimination of images from religious spaces, as “an imaginative vacuum was left that the cult of Elizabeth was called on to fill” (135).
Chapter 6, “The Emerging Aesthetic of Early Modern England: A New World with Echoes of the Past,” explores the role of the Calvinist religious framework in the rise of Renaissance theater, lyrical poetry, and music in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Chapter, 7, “The New Visual Culture of Reformed Holland and France,” argues that Calvin’s Institutes articulated a “programmatic structure for life in the world” that pushed Calvin’s followers “out of the church to live . . . this divine drama in their everyday life” (168).
The eighth chapter and epilogue, subtitled “The Cultural Afterlife of Protestant Aesthetics,” briefly sketches the influence of the Calvinist tradition on North American landscape painting and the ecological movement, among other things, and the epilogue concludes with reflections on the legacy of iconoclasm and the disenchantment of the world often linked to Protestantism.
W. David O. Taylor, Glimpses of the New Creation: Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2019)
This ambitious volume develops in considerable detail a theological framework for examining the role of art in Christian worship. Taylor’s wide-ranging reflections on distinct artistic media ultimately center around the notion that the arts have a “formative power” for corporate devotion to the Triune God. He expresses the overarching goal of his efforts as follows: “My aim in the end is to present a vision for the arts in worship as instruments of the Trinity—and as glimpses of the new creation—to form and feed the people of God” (14).
Taylor structures his study such that the middle chapters (4–9) treat of the “singular powers” of specific art forms (music, visual and architectural arts, poetry, narrative arts, theater arts, and kinetic arts), and the bookending chapters present much useful framing material for his inquiry.
In Chapter 1, “The Meanings of Worship,” Taylor offers the following working definition of worship: “In worship the faithful bring their whole humanity, alongside the whole people of God, in proclamation, prayer, and praise, before the presence of the whole Godhead for the sake of the whole world” (36). In this effort, Taylor makes the provocative claim that the arts should not be valued purely for themselves, but instead they “should always serve the church on the terms of corporate worship, whatever they may be for a given congregation” (17).
Chapter 2, “The Meanings of Art,” proposes as an integral feature of the arts that they “bring us into an intentional and intensive participation in the physical, emotional, and imaginative aspect of our humanity” (40–41).
Chapter 3, “The Theological Meanings of Art in Worship,” combines insights from the first two chapters and begins with the claim that the question of art in worship requires a response to more fundamental questions about the roles played by creation and culture-making in God’s economy (57). In an effort at responding to these questions, Taylor advances twelve affirmations that collectively uphold the high value that should be placed on creation and culture as arenas within which the Trinity is constantly at work.
With this foundation in place, Taylor turns in Chapters 4–9 to the “singular powers” of six distinct artistic media, as mentioned above, after which Chapter 10, “Mother Tongues and Adjectival Tongues,” explores the tensions between, on the one hand, a congregation being “fully itself” in the role that the arts play in its worship, and, on the other hand, the appropriateness of a congregation being led to new forms of worship through the Spirit (211).
The final chapter, “The Worship Arts and the Mission of the Church,” concludes with the hope that “our liturgical art practices will make it possible for ‘all the families of the nations’ (Ps. 22:27 NRSV) to know and love the Trinity” (237).
Taylor’s volume provides extensive resources to which one will want to return.
This ambitious volume develops in considerable detail a theological framework for examining the role of art in Christian worship. Taylor’s wide-ranging reflections on distinct artistic media ultimately center around the notion that the arts have a “formative power” for corporate devotion to the Triune God. He expresses the overarching goal of his efforts as follows: “My aim in the end is to present a vision for the arts in worship as instruments of the Trinity—and as glimpses of the new creation—to form and feed the people of God” (14).
Taylor structures his study such that the middle chapters (4–9) treat of the “singular powers” of specific art forms (music, visual and architectural arts, poetry, narrative arts, theater arts, and kinetic arts), and the bookending chapters present much useful framing material for his inquiry.
In Chapter 1, “The Meanings of Worship,” Taylor offers the following working definition of worship: “In worship the faithful bring their whole humanity, alongside the whole people of God, in proclamation, prayer, and praise, before the presence of the whole Godhead for the sake of the whole world” (36). In this effort, Taylor makes the provocative claim that the arts should not be valued purely for themselves, but instead they “should always serve the church on the terms of corporate worship, whatever they may be for a given congregation” (17).
Chapter 2, “The Meanings of Art,” proposes as an integral feature of the arts that they “bring us into an intentional and intensive participation in the physical, emotional, and imaginative aspect of our humanity” (40–41).
Chapter 3, “The Theological Meanings of Art in Worship,” combines insights from the first two chapters and begins with the claim that the question of art in worship requires a response to more fundamental questions about the roles played by creation and culture-making in God’s economy (57). In an effort at responding to these questions, Taylor advances twelve affirmations that collectively uphold the high value that should be placed on creation and culture as arenas within which the Trinity is constantly at work.
With this foundation in place, Taylor turns in Chapters 4–9 to the “singular powers” of six distinct artistic media, as mentioned above, after which Chapter 10, “Mother Tongues and Adjectival Tongues,” explores the tensions between, on the one hand, a congregation being “fully itself” in the role that the arts play in its worship, and, on the other hand, the appropriateness of a congregation being led to new forms of worship through the Spirit (211).
The final chapter, “The Worship Arts and the Mission of the Church,” concludes with the hope that “our liturgical art practices will make it possible for ‘all the families of the nations’ (Ps. 22:27 NRSV) to know and love the Trinity” (237).
Taylor’s volume provides extensive resources to which one will want to return.