ON THE SHELF
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 assistant 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.
In every issue, book review editor Mark McInroy supplies notes on books recently released in theology and the arts. He is an assistant 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.
Natasha O’Hear and Anthony O’Hear. Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Natasha O’Hear and Anthony O’Hear begin Picturing the Apolcalypse with the observation that the Book of Revelation has exerted a powerful influence on its readers from the early church down to the present day, not only in Christian circles, but more broadly in popular culture as well. The volume introduces Revelation by way of the responses it has provoked from artists, musicians, and writers through the centuries. The authors operate under the conviction that “the true significance of a visionary text such as Revelation may be brought out more fully in works of art, visual and otherwise, than in theological treatises on the significance of its symbols” (4).
An introduction orients the reader to the central features of Revelation, and it treats briefly a number of the artworks that will be revisited throughout the volume. Chapter 1, “The Angel of the Apocalypse: John’s Journey and his Angelic Guides,” first looks at John’s prophetic commission through works such as Dürer’s Apocalypse series and the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry.
Chapter 2, “The Lamb,” examines the portrayal of Christ as the Lamb of God in the Ghent Altarpiece, the Trinity Apocalypse, the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, Ravenna San Vitale, and Blake’s The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne. The authors note that, although the Lamb is cast in Revelation as sacrificed and yet triumphant, these visualizations of the Lamb tend to depict only one of these characterizations and not the other. Blake, for instance, captures the passivity of the Lamb; the Ghent Altarpiece conveys the Lamb’s triumphant aspect. The situation changes, however, when music is considered.
Chapter 3, “The Four Horsemen,” examines some of the most well-known figures from Revelation, and the authors open the chapter by surveying briefly the many ways in which this particular imagery has worked its way into popular culture. After these opening remarks, the chapter moves to the medieval period, during which there is a tendency to depict the first horseman (conquest) as Christ. With Dürer, all four horsemen are depicted together and allusions to Christ diminish. The suffering wrought by these figures is also augmented in Dürer, which prompts the authors to ask where a good God fits in this vision. Although the horsemen are shown as agents of God (if not Christ himself) in pre-modern works, artists such as J. Haynes, James Gilray, and William Blake sever any ties to God, and in so doing depict the four horsemen as purely demonic. This tendency continues in more recent portrayals of the horsemen in Gordon Cheung’s art as well as computer games, popular music, and album covers.
Chapter 4, “The Seven Seals: Angelic Destruction,” makes an opening nod to the Ingmar Bergman film before making the important point that, like the four horsemen, the destructive events that follows the opening of the seals enact God’s will. They “can be seen as a form of necessary and radical purgation prior to the establishment of the New Jerusalem in Rev. 21-2” (95).
Chapter 5, “The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” examines the figure from Revelation 12 through a number of images, including that found in the Bamberg Apocalypse, the Trinity Apocalypse, Memling’s St. John Altarpiece, and Dürer’s Apocalypse series. The chapter also treats Velázquez’s Immaculate Conception, William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, and Odilon Redon’s A Woman Clothed with the Sun. Whereas the early depictions tend to view the woman as the church, during the Renaissance she gains distinctively Marian features. The modern images depart from this trend with deeply intriguing portrayals.
Chapter 6, “The Satanic Trinity,” treats the “colourful reception history” of the notorious Beasts of Revelation. After a vivid tour of medieval, Reformation, and modern depictions of the Beasts, the authors note the decision artists have to make about them: does one portray the powerful and grotesque aspects of the Beasts in an effort at conveying how easily they can dispose of any human beings who would resist them, or does one instead “emphasize their more psychological menace, in which they seduce by deception and subterfuge, superficially indistinguishable from the forces of good they seek to subvert” (153)? Whereas medieval depictions typically opt for the former approach, many modern treatments pursue the latter, as captured in images of Nicolae Carpathia from the Left Behind graphic novels.
Chapter 7, “The Whore of Babylon,” claims that, although the Whore has been interpreted as a symbol for a remarkably wide range of things throughout the centuries, her sexuality remains constant as the source of her power over her opponents. This troublingly misogynistic history means, among other things, that she remains relevant in our contemporary setting in ways unforeseen by the author of Revelation.
Chapter 8, “Armageddon, the Millennium, and the Last Judgment,” investigates these three major topics through magnificent pieces such as The Flemish Apocalypse, The Trinity Apocalypse, John Martin’s The Last Judgment, William Blake’s The Vision of the Last Judgment, and Max Beckmann’s Resurrection. The authors highlight here the capability of the visual medium to treat topics such as salvation and damnation simultaneously rather than in sequence, as narrative is forced to do.
Chapter 9, “The New Jerusalem,” notes that, whereas medieval treatments typically depict the New Jerusalem as visually unremarkable, modern portrayals by Martin, Cheung, and Blake produce grand, sweeping images that are arresting to the viewer.
The final chapter and conclusion of the book bring treatments of Revelation firmly into the contemporary period
Natasha O’Hear and Anthony O’Hear begin Picturing the Apolcalypse with the observation that the Book of Revelation has exerted a powerful influence on its readers from the early church down to the present day, not only in Christian circles, but more broadly in popular culture as well. The volume introduces Revelation by way of the responses it has provoked from artists, musicians, and writers through the centuries. The authors operate under the conviction that “the true significance of a visionary text such as Revelation may be brought out more fully in works of art, visual and otherwise, than in theological treatises on the significance of its symbols” (4).
An introduction orients the reader to the central features of Revelation, and it treats briefly a number of the artworks that will be revisited throughout the volume. Chapter 1, “The Angel of the Apocalypse: John’s Journey and his Angelic Guides,” first looks at John’s prophetic commission through works such as Dürer’s Apocalypse series and the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry.
Chapter 2, “The Lamb,” examines the portrayal of Christ as the Lamb of God in the Ghent Altarpiece, the Trinity Apocalypse, the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, Ravenna San Vitale, and Blake’s The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne. The authors note that, although the Lamb is cast in Revelation as sacrificed and yet triumphant, these visualizations of the Lamb tend to depict only one of these characterizations and not the other. Blake, for instance, captures the passivity of the Lamb; the Ghent Altarpiece conveys the Lamb’s triumphant aspect. The situation changes, however, when music is considered.
Chapter 3, “The Four Horsemen,” examines some of the most well-known figures from Revelation, and the authors open the chapter by surveying briefly the many ways in which this particular imagery has worked its way into popular culture. After these opening remarks, the chapter moves to the medieval period, during which there is a tendency to depict the first horseman (conquest) as Christ. With Dürer, all four horsemen are depicted together and allusions to Christ diminish. The suffering wrought by these figures is also augmented in Dürer, which prompts the authors to ask where a good God fits in this vision. Although the horsemen are shown as agents of God (if not Christ himself) in pre-modern works, artists such as J. Haynes, James Gilray, and William Blake sever any ties to God, and in so doing depict the four horsemen as purely demonic. This tendency continues in more recent portrayals of the horsemen in Gordon Cheung’s art as well as computer games, popular music, and album covers.
Chapter 4, “The Seven Seals: Angelic Destruction,” makes an opening nod to the Ingmar Bergman film before making the important point that, like the four horsemen, the destructive events that follows the opening of the seals enact God’s will. They “can be seen as a form of necessary and radical purgation prior to the establishment of the New Jerusalem in Rev. 21-2” (95).
Chapter 5, “The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” examines the figure from Revelation 12 through a number of images, including that found in the Bamberg Apocalypse, the Trinity Apocalypse, Memling’s St. John Altarpiece, and Dürer’s Apocalypse series. The chapter also treats Velázquez’s Immaculate Conception, William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, and Odilon Redon’s A Woman Clothed with the Sun. Whereas the early depictions tend to view the woman as the church, during the Renaissance she gains distinctively Marian features. The modern images depart from this trend with deeply intriguing portrayals.
Chapter 6, “The Satanic Trinity,” treats the “colourful reception history” of the notorious Beasts of Revelation. After a vivid tour of medieval, Reformation, and modern depictions of the Beasts, the authors note the decision artists have to make about them: does one portray the powerful and grotesque aspects of the Beasts in an effort at conveying how easily they can dispose of any human beings who would resist them, or does one instead “emphasize their more psychological menace, in which they seduce by deception and subterfuge, superficially indistinguishable from the forces of good they seek to subvert” (153)? Whereas medieval depictions typically opt for the former approach, many modern treatments pursue the latter, as captured in images of Nicolae Carpathia from the Left Behind graphic novels.
Chapter 7, “The Whore of Babylon,” claims that, although the Whore has been interpreted as a symbol for a remarkably wide range of things throughout the centuries, her sexuality remains constant as the source of her power over her opponents. This troublingly misogynistic history means, among other things, that she remains relevant in our contemporary setting in ways unforeseen by the author of Revelation.
Chapter 8, “Armageddon, the Millennium, and the Last Judgment,” investigates these three major topics through magnificent pieces such as The Flemish Apocalypse, The Trinity Apocalypse, John Martin’s The Last Judgment, William Blake’s The Vision of the Last Judgment, and Max Beckmann’s Resurrection. The authors highlight here the capability of the visual medium to treat topics such as salvation and damnation simultaneously rather than in sequence, as narrative is forced to do.
Chapter 9, “The New Jerusalem,” notes that, whereas medieval treatments typically depict the New Jerusalem as visually unremarkable, modern portrayals by Martin, Cheung, and Blake produce grand, sweeping images that are arresting to the viewer.
The final chapter and conclusion of the book bring treatments of Revelation firmly into the contemporary period
David Lyle Jeffrey, In the Beauty of Holiness: Art and the Bible in Western Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017).
David Lyle Jeffrey’s In the Beauty of Holiness examines the intricate relationship between holiness and beauty in the Christian tradition. Jeffrey begins with the observation that the biblical imagination understands all beauty as gift in response to which a reciprocating beauty is gratefully offered to the giver. Broadly speaking, the book tells two stories, the first of which augments the connection between beauty and the giver of beauty by tracing the development of “holy beauty” through the Christian tradition. The second story concerns the separation of beauty from its initial, holy home beginning around 1500.
The first story begins in Chapter 1, “Beauty and Holiness as Terms of Art,” which defines the two key terms of the volume through an examination of biblical treatments of the concepts. The chapter also includes an investigation of early Christian art, especially in the catacombs. Chapter 2, “The Paradoxical Beauty of the Cross,” discusses the manner in which Augustine presses Neoplatonic treatments of beauty into service for Christian theology. His effort results in a view of creation as the art of God, through which God can be known. Augustine also, to Jeffrey, offers a revolutionary view of beauty by identifying the cross as beauty in its supreme form. Chapter 3, “Beauty and Proportion in the Sanctuary,” examines Christian architecture from the sixth through twelfth centuries, and Jeffrey characterizes these holy spaces as sites in which one finds a “harmonious coinherence of mortal and eternal beauty” (4). Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Light,” turns to Gothic architecture, in particular the theological symbolism of light that animated the magnificent stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals in the thirteenth century. Chapter 5, “The Beauty of Holiness Alfresco,” treats the wall paintings in thirteenth-century Italian churches (especially those of Giotto), and Jeffrey regards these expressions of Franciscan spirituality as offering viewers images in which “the face of the holy came to look much more like the face of a good neighbor” (124), thus setting the stage for painting in the Renaissance. Chapter 6, “Beauty on the Altar,” notes the evolution of altars from simple tables to sites in which the story of human salvation is told in précis, as found in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. By the end of this process, the altar becomes “the artistic center and visual high point of many medieval churches and cathedrals” (155), and wall paintings diminish in importance. Correlatively, emphasis on Christ’s earthly ministry fades as attention focuses on eschatology and the life to come.
The second story (i.e., the story of beauty’s separation from holiness) begins in Chapter 7, “Beauty, Power, and Doctrine,” which notes the fracturing of the old order because of “the temptation to acquisitiveness, to hankering after beauty for the sake of carnal gratification and political power” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (5). During this time art becomes a matter of tremendous prestige, but both the cult of the virtuoso and competition among patrons balloon, resulting ultimately in a strained relation between beauty and its transcendent source. Chapter 8, “Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder,” investigates depictions of David and Bathsheba from the late medieval to early modern period. Jeffrey argues here that many of these works “become occasions for an indulgence in beauty ‘for beauty’s sake,’ often an explicit encouragement to the commodification of sexual beauty and voyeurism” (6). Chapter 9, “Romantic Religion and the Sublime,” upholds David Caspar Friedrich and William Wordsworth as paradigmatic figures for the post-Enlightenment relocation of holy beauty from its transcendent source to nature itself. Chapter 10, “Art after Belief,” examines figures such as Johann Overbeck, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, and Jeffrey claims in this chapter that art is looked to as a substitute for religion during this period. And yet, at the end of the nineteenth century these nostalgic efforts for a lost Christian past produced such diverse and eclectic ideas that, in Jeffrey’s words, “We have arrived . . . at the threshold of artistic postmodernity” (287). Chapter 11, “Art against Belief,” characterizes artists such as Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso as explicitly anti-Christian. To Jeffrey, “Elements of a kind of beauty can be found in the work of these artists, but it is usually a fragment of beauty whose disunifying purpose is to subvert the holy” (315). The story thus far will be familiar to many readers, but Jeffrey’s final chapter is somewhat unexpected and refreshing. Chapter 12, “The Return of the Transcendentals,” treats the works of Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, and Jean-Marie Pirot (Arcabas). Here Jeffrey notes the influence on all three artists of both intensive Bible reading and the philosophy of Jacques Maritain. As a result, to Jeffrey, “In their work, the return of the transcendentals [truth, goodness, and beauty] signals a recrudescence of hope, a rebirth in modern art of its ancient, life-giving meaning and, yes, purpose” (362). An epilogue and three appendices complete the book.
David Lyle Jeffrey’s In the Beauty of Holiness examines the intricate relationship between holiness and beauty in the Christian tradition. Jeffrey begins with the observation that the biblical imagination understands all beauty as gift in response to which a reciprocating beauty is gratefully offered to the giver. Broadly speaking, the book tells two stories, the first of which augments the connection between beauty and the giver of beauty by tracing the development of “holy beauty” through the Christian tradition. The second story concerns the separation of beauty from its initial, holy home beginning around 1500.
The first story begins in Chapter 1, “Beauty and Holiness as Terms of Art,” which defines the two key terms of the volume through an examination of biblical treatments of the concepts. The chapter also includes an investigation of early Christian art, especially in the catacombs. Chapter 2, “The Paradoxical Beauty of the Cross,” discusses the manner in which Augustine presses Neoplatonic treatments of beauty into service for Christian theology. His effort results in a view of creation as the art of God, through which God can be known. Augustine also, to Jeffrey, offers a revolutionary view of beauty by identifying the cross as beauty in its supreme form. Chapter 3, “Beauty and Proportion in the Sanctuary,” examines Christian architecture from the sixth through twelfth centuries, and Jeffrey characterizes these holy spaces as sites in which one finds a “harmonious coinherence of mortal and eternal beauty” (4). Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Light,” turns to Gothic architecture, in particular the theological symbolism of light that animated the magnificent stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals in the thirteenth century. Chapter 5, “The Beauty of Holiness Alfresco,” treats the wall paintings in thirteenth-century Italian churches (especially those of Giotto), and Jeffrey regards these expressions of Franciscan spirituality as offering viewers images in which “the face of the holy came to look much more like the face of a good neighbor” (124), thus setting the stage for painting in the Renaissance. Chapter 6, “Beauty on the Altar,” notes the evolution of altars from simple tables to sites in which the story of human salvation is told in précis, as found in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. By the end of this process, the altar becomes “the artistic center and visual high point of many medieval churches and cathedrals” (155), and wall paintings diminish in importance. Correlatively, emphasis on Christ’s earthly ministry fades as attention focuses on eschatology and the life to come.
The second story (i.e., the story of beauty’s separation from holiness) begins in Chapter 7, “Beauty, Power, and Doctrine,” which notes the fracturing of the old order because of “the temptation to acquisitiveness, to hankering after beauty for the sake of carnal gratification and political power” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (5). During this time art becomes a matter of tremendous prestige, but both the cult of the virtuoso and competition among patrons balloon, resulting ultimately in a strained relation between beauty and its transcendent source. Chapter 8, “Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder,” investigates depictions of David and Bathsheba from the late medieval to early modern period. Jeffrey argues here that many of these works “become occasions for an indulgence in beauty ‘for beauty’s sake,’ often an explicit encouragement to the commodification of sexual beauty and voyeurism” (6). Chapter 9, “Romantic Religion and the Sublime,” upholds David Caspar Friedrich and William Wordsworth as paradigmatic figures for the post-Enlightenment relocation of holy beauty from its transcendent source to nature itself. Chapter 10, “Art after Belief,” examines figures such as Johann Overbeck, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, and Jeffrey claims in this chapter that art is looked to as a substitute for religion during this period. And yet, at the end of the nineteenth century these nostalgic efforts for a lost Christian past produced such diverse and eclectic ideas that, in Jeffrey’s words, “We have arrived . . . at the threshold of artistic postmodernity” (287). Chapter 11, “Art against Belief,” characterizes artists such as Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso as explicitly anti-Christian. To Jeffrey, “Elements of a kind of beauty can be found in the work of these artists, but it is usually a fragment of beauty whose disunifying purpose is to subvert the holy” (315). The story thus far will be familiar to many readers, but Jeffrey’s final chapter is somewhat unexpected and refreshing. Chapter 12, “The Return of the Transcendentals,” treats the works of Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, and Jean-Marie Pirot (Arcabas). Here Jeffrey notes the influence on all three artists of both intensive Bible reading and the philosophy of Jacques Maritain. As a result, to Jeffrey, “In their work, the return of the transcendentals [truth, goodness, and beauty] signals a recrudescence of hope, a rebirth in modern art of its ancient, life-giving meaning and, yes, purpose” (362). An epilogue and three appendices complete the book.
C. A. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
In Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), C. A. Tsakiridou seeks to address a twofold problem in studies of icons. First, those who study icons from a theological perspective tend to downplay the aesthetic aspects of the pieces they examine. Second, those who approach icons from an art-historical vantage point tend to underemphasize the theology that they embody. As a corrective, Tsakiridou applies to the icon Heidegger’s notion “that the radical depletion of being in Western modernity can be reversed by art’s onto-poetic potency” and Gadamer’s definition of the “artistic picture as an ‘ontological event’ capable of fulfilling the self-expressive potential of its original” (18). To Tsakiridou, the view of the icon that emerges is of a spiritual being that achieves a form of theosis, or participation in God.
Tsakiridou divides her study into four distinct sections. The first section, “Preliminaries,” rehearses the animating rationale behind the monograph and defines important concepts such as enargeia, ekphraseis, kallos, and hesychia. The most important term here is enargeia, which Tsakiridou develops at length, but which she describes at one point as “that movement in the work of art that constitutes its object as a living being” (56). The second section, “Theology and Art,” argues that Modernist and contemporary engagements with icons frequently commit two fallacies (the “intentional fallacy” and the “affective fallacy”) that have been highly influential in studies of the Christian image. The third section, “Orthodox Iconology,” advances a view of icons that “recognizes the art object’s enargic or plenary life” (25), drawing from the Desert Fathers, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, and other figures. The fourth section, “Theophany and Art,” innovatively compares icons with Modernist and Zen art, and Tsakiridou finds noteworthy affinities among the ostensibly different types of art she examines. The volume contains 48 color plates. The works of traditional artists such as Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev are displayed along with those of Modernist figures. The Zen art of Kano Seisenin Masanobu and Ienaga Ichido is also displayed in the book’s final chapter.
In Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), C. A. Tsakiridou seeks to address a twofold problem in studies of icons. First, those who study icons from a theological perspective tend to downplay the aesthetic aspects of the pieces they examine. Second, those who approach icons from an art-historical vantage point tend to underemphasize the theology that they embody. As a corrective, Tsakiridou applies to the icon Heidegger’s notion “that the radical depletion of being in Western modernity can be reversed by art’s onto-poetic potency” and Gadamer’s definition of the “artistic picture as an ‘ontological event’ capable of fulfilling the self-expressive potential of its original” (18). To Tsakiridou, the view of the icon that emerges is of a spiritual being that achieves a form of theosis, or participation in God.
Tsakiridou divides her study into four distinct sections. The first section, “Preliminaries,” rehearses the animating rationale behind the monograph and defines important concepts such as enargeia, ekphraseis, kallos, and hesychia. The most important term here is enargeia, which Tsakiridou develops at length, but which she describes at one point as “that movement in the work of art that constitutes its object as a living being” (56). The second section, “Theology and Art,” argues that Modernist and contemporary engagements with icons frequently commit two fallacies (the “intentional fallacy” and the “affective fallacy”) that have been highly influential in studies of the Christian image. The third section, “Orthodox Iconology,” advances a view of icons that “recognizes the art object’s enargic or plenary life” (25), drawing from the Desert Fathers, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, and other figures. The fourth section, “Theophany and Art,” innovatively compares icons with Modernist and Zen art, and Tsakiridou finds noteworthy affinities among the ostensibly different types of art she examines. The volume contains 48 color plates. The works of traditional artists such as Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev are displayed along with those of Modernist figures. The Zen art of Kano Seisenin Masanobu and Ienaga Ichido is also displayed in the book’s final chapter.