Last week Shane Claiborne came out to Quest and chatted with us about what he has been up to in his Jesus for President tour. One thing that keeps coming back to me from Shane’s talk is his insistence on the re-imagination of politics. What holds together the seemingly random things Shane has done, such as living in community, their wall street money drop, or driving a bus that runs on vegetable oil is that they are all ways of re-imagining politics. Not politics as simply choosing leaders to lead our country, but politics in the much larger sense as a way of coming together as a society for a common purpose, as a way of using the collective power of a group for an agreed upon end. That’s why the church is an alternative political body to the state. It’s also why when Shane talks about “re-imagning politics” it has very little to do about deciding who to vote for and a lot more about creatively imagining another a way of being—a way of being that interrupts injustice and fascinates people with it’s upside down ways of love of enemy, jubilee economics, and power through weakness.
Alongside this re-imagination of politics I’ve been ruminating on icons, those old two dimensional paintings of holy people and events. Specifically I’ve been looking at and contemplating The Sinai Pantocrator which is one of the earliest icons (~6th century) of Jesus. And the question that has been bugging me is how a politics that insists we interrupt injustice intersects with contemplating an icon. On the surface the veneration of icons seems a very interior and “spiritual” experience with little impact on the “real” world. To put it succinctly, the question for me is “are icons so spiritual as to be of no earthly good?”
One obvious direction might be to say that rest and refreshment for the soul is necessary to keep from becoming a burned-out activist. However, I think icons offer much more than that if we look closely at the theology behind them. Icons lead invariably to the Incarnation which reminds of the goodness of “stuff,” and the stuff of earth—dirt, paint, blood, flesh—can become a resting place for God.
A little background is necessary to back that conclusion. Icons, which is simply the Greek word for image, were a “given” as part of the early Christian worship experience. At first it was just simple symbols of a fish and loaves scratched in a catacomb or a humble statue of a shepherd. But when Christianity was legalized in the 4th century priests encouraged artists to create paintings that were “Bibles without words” for the masses and which surpassed and filled in with color the words of their sermons. In time the images were treated with the same reverence as you would the real person they depicted. The faithful touched, kissed, and bowed down before them causing some to worry that the distinction between the wood and the person depicted was being lost—idolatry!
A long, bitter, and, at times, bloody battle between the iconoclasts (destroyers of icons) and iconodules (lovers of icons) ensued. The iconodules eventually won the day, largely because of a series of treaties by John of Damascus, a monk living in the Holy Lands. He recognized that something much bigger than whether or not Christians should make images of religious figures was at stake, but that the heart of the debate was about the reality of the Incarnation. John agreed that the Old Testament forbade making an image of God, but that the Incarnation of the Logos changed the rules of the game. He asked, “if Christ can not be painted as a human being, how could one claim that God had become incarnate?” Under that question is the bigger question, “can matter, the stuff of earth, become a resting place for the untouchable God?”
Yes, the iconodules answered, and moreover an icon invites a confession of incarnation: “he who is without flesh, became flesh…. The uncreated one was made. The impalpable one was touched.” “Yes, but,” the iconoclasts argued back, “there is a difference between an image on wood and the reality of Jesus in the flesh or in the Eucharist.” “Agreed,” the iconodules replied, “the shadow and the reality that casts it are not the same, but the image points to the reality, it is a window through which the reality is seen.” Which is why icons, be they LED pixels or wood and beeswax, are only holy while they portray a holy person or event. Once the image is gone or effaced they can be thrown in the fire. Moreover, Theodore of Studium, a generation after John, added that we can venerate icons because our faith is a intrinsically holistic one where soul and body, matter and spirit are bound together. We do not have a faith that is just about right doctrine or theological abstractions: “If merely mental contemplation had been sufficient, it would have been enough for him to come to us in a merely mental way” (Theodore).
What the long debate over icons clarified was that matter has within itself the capacity to become a resting place for God, to become something other while remaining what it is (The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 248). This means that things can become the vehicle for God’s presence among us. It is why Christianity is a religion of stuff, of matter—of crosses and bones and stones. The way to God passes through things that can be seen and touched.
And this is where I find my imagination filling with the possibilities of where icons lead us as we leave the quiet of contemplation.
It points towards care of creation because icons remind us that matter is good; good enough to become the dwelling place of God. Saying that matter is good is another way of saying that creation is good, and thus it is to be honored rather than abused and polluted.
It points towards the love of neighbor, the face of God in the other that Isaac has quoted from Herbert McCabe: Christ is present to us insofar as we are present to one another. Not only “things,” but people can become the vehicle for God’s presence among us, and this is only because God has bridged the gap between spirit and matter by becoming the one we can see in the person of Jesus.
Finally, it points towards the hope of redemption. An icon is a pledge that things can become other than they are while still maintaining their identity. If wood and paint can depict God, then flesh and blood can aspire to likeness with God. Or, as John of Damascus put it, “by surrendering his godhead to our flesh, God has deified our flesh.”
14 responses so far ↓
1 isaac // Nov 13, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Hmm. Icons…. I don’t know what to think about them. I am in fundamental agreement that Christians are materialists. Not in the sense of buying lot of things; rather, materialists in that we believe material—earth, dirt, blood, paint, flesh, etc—displays God’s life. Pseudo-Dionysius (and Thomas Aquinas) emphasize the significance of the multiplicity and variety of creation. We need all of it do display the simplicity of God.
So, why do we need icons? If we know that incarnation means materiality reveals God’s life, why do we need icons? They are redundant at best, an abstraction and distraction at worst. If we have dirt, why do we need paintings? A beautiful icon doesn’t necessarily cure us of our inability to see how dirt displays the beauty of God, right?
Isn’t it interesting that priests needed to tell people to paint icons once Christianity is legalized? I mean, since the church no longer has martyrs, we need painters to help us see what Christ looks like. The early church said that people who died because of their faith demonstrated what Christ looked like—they were martyrs, “witnesses.” Instead of following Jesus, and following the people who followed Jesus to their own cross, now we look at pretty pictures.
John Damascene is at his best when he talks about how icons are primarily ethical: “we make them helpful for living, showing the holiness of these men for an example to all” (On Divine Images, 38). Icons are helpful in that they are examples. To contemplate an icon means a way of life. It takes your whole body. It’s a very different practice than looking at a piece of art and praying. For Damascene, icons enable the contemplative life that incorporates the whole body. It’s ethics. The problem, it seems to me, is that we want the pretty pictures without their way of life. Without the habits of life that inform our contemplative vision, icons are simply another commodity for worshipful consumption. “Oooo, I feel so close to Jesus when I look at this pretty picture; I just want to sing ‘More Than Oxygen’!”
One more thing. Jason, that dude is white, really white! He don’t look like me, nor my black friends. Looks to me like colonialism is just around the corner from that image of a white Jesus. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their chapter on faciality, “Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face” (A Thousand Plateaus, 178). And when they say “White-Man face,” they are talking about the construction of the European Jesus that fueled colonialism and crusades.
At best, icons are ambiguous; at worst, they are downright dangerous. To get back to your discussion of political imagination: icons are already politics. That’s an insight from Deleuze and Guattari: “The face is a politics” (181). You don’t need to make icons political; they already display a politics, and they create a political vision. They show us what kind of faces, what kind of bodies, more closely approximate the ‘goodness’ of Christ. White, yes; black, no. And the rest of us exist on a continuum between those two poles.
Mennonites were iconoclasts. Instead of icons, they told the stories of martyrs: The Martyrs’ Mirror. And it’s significant that the book of martyrs’ stories had the word “mirror” in the title. As we retell the stories of the martyrs, we come to see how our lives approximate their witness, their display of Christ’s life. Icons are the people who pick up their cross and bear it daily.
2 Danny // Nov 14, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Thanks for this thoughtful post and counter-post. Let me now weigh in with my ten cents about globalization. This is a relatively new term with relatively modern connotations. To try and apply the terms ‘globalization’ to things like icons is an anachronism. I do understand that now that the church has moved all over the world and that race is a decisive divider of people’s that we should be using ‘inclusive’ icons, but we still need to use them. Much of the word is still illiterate and still needs heaven and earth to connect through a certain point in space.
3 ….links for your linking pleasure 4…… « Community of the Risen // Nov 14, 2008 at 2:07 pm
[...] Over at blip there is a good discussion beginning about iconoclasts and their opponents. I would suggest [...]
4 Jason // Nov 14, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Isaac & Danny, thanks for chiming in.
@danny: good point about globalization. I would say though that rather than “inclusive” icons we should have a plethora of them from various cultures so that they still maintain their particularity.
@isaac:
First, I just want to point out that Christian art, including depictions of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, existed before Constantine took over, it was just in the catacombs and not the churches. There has always been a push to want to see and touch the one in whom we believe.
Now, I would agree with you that the martyrs are mirrors of Christ’s life, but that doesn’t make them a substitute for icons. Why? Because like the blind man in John 9 I want to see Jesus. I don’t want to see an abstraction of him or an aspect of Jesus or Jesus as a generalization, but the singular historical figure Jesus. And that’s what icons offer that martyrs and saints do not. Martyrs and saints give us hints of Jesus, whiffs of him, shadows of his character, but because each martyr is a unique individual they are showing Jesus as a generality or an abstraction. The Orthodox would claim, and I would agree, that when you gaze at an icon you are seeing the actual person you are looking at—that is their mystery and holiness. That’s why they’re coined “windows to heaven” because we look through them and see a reality of God being made manifest in wood and beeswax. You may not agree that this is what you see when you see an icon, but would you agree that it is a possibility? That because of the Incarnation, the Logos or Paul or Mary can be seen because God has shown that God is able to sanctify matter?
That leads me to the second point about your comment that it’s dangerous because an icon, by its particularity, can only display one kind of face. And that’s why I would say we need icons from all the cultures where Jesus has appeared. Because our God is an incarnate God I see the important thing as being that it is Jesus being depicted, taking whatever form he appears in the minds of a culture’s people. And to dovetail to your thought about this icon’s whiteness, I would point to the fact that it was likely written by an Egyptian Christian around the 6th century at the monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai—a time before we had created a racism based on skin color. That we would so easily identify this icon with a white European instead of an African from Egypt perhaps speaks more to the way racism still colors our sight today.
5 isaac // Nov 14, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I’ll start with where you ended. All I’m saying about the ambiguity of icons is that there’s nothing special about them in and of themselves. It’s about what you do with your life as a response to the icons. Icons, in and of themselves, do nothing. They don’t enact anything. They are ambiguous. And they are dangerously ambiguous because they helped fuel colonialism and the emerging European racial imagination. Icons like the one you displayed played an important role in the construction of whiteness as normative. That’s just the way history went.
6 isaac // Nov 14, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I don’t know about depicting Jesus is whatever culture we see fit—”whatever forms he appears in the minds of a culture’s people.” It iconography is serious about the incarnation, then they wouldn’t make Jesus so familiar to their culture. Jesus is a Jew. So depict him like a 1st century Palestinian Jew. Anything else would be to rip him out of his body, which seems to me to be a subtle from of supersessionist embarrassment of the Jewishness of Jesus.
7 isaac // Nov 15, 2008 at 5:12 am
“to see Jesus.” “Not an abstraction.”
I think this is the heart of the matter. It’s about our desire to see Jesus. And this is ultimately why I wonder if icons are distractions. It’s funny to me that you think pictures are more real than people. An icon is more of an abstraction than real flesh. And if it’s truly the real flesh of Jesus you want, then go visit prisoners and feed the hungry. Jesus already told you where you can find him—in real flesh and blood, not pretty pictures (Matt 25). Looking at a picture is much easier than dedicating your life to visiting prisoners. That’s my worry: icons are an abstraction and a distraction from the living Jesus scandalously present in the “least of these.”
8 Jason // Nov 15, 2008 at 9:58 am
I’m glad you’re pushing on this, it’s helped me clarify just what it is I’m trying to get at.
I’m wondering if you know why anabaptists were originally iconoclasts since they were around before colonialism and the advent of modern racism? Just curious.
The root of the dilemma for me is “can we make an image of God?” And you’re right, if we say yes, it’s dangerous because that image can constrain and shape God into our image and be used as a weapon. But that means the incarnation was also dangerous for those same reasons, and, as you alluded to, the historical figure of Jesus has been used as a weapon against Jewish people (strangely enough, by ridding him of his Jewishness).
But if God is willing to take the risk of being imaged as a human and limited by place and culture, then I think we can also (with trepidation) take that risk. Yes, we can see Jesus in the poor, but we can also hear of Jesus in the gospels and see him when those gospels are “written” as images. As John of Damascus writes in his first treatise: “We proclaim Him also by our senses on all sides, and we sanctify the noblest sense, which is that of sight. The image is a memorial, just what words are to a listening ear. What a book is to the literate, that an image is to the illiterate. The image speaks to the sight as words to the ear; it brings us understanding.”
Finally, you make the good point that depicting Jesus as he appears in various cultures would be “ripping him out of his body.” However, the goal of an icon is not to be a photograph. It’s not as though we would have the perfect icon if only they had digital cameras back then or that we would be better off if we used the face reconstructed by archaeology and science. I think we can, and should, depict Jesus as different cultures see him because the incarnation did not mean that every aspect of the body of Jesus of Nazareth “had to be”—there were some which were incidental. The color of his skin was incidental, his Jewsishness was not. His maleness was incidental, his compassion was not. And so on. An icon that portrays Jesus can only be identified as Jesus if it is recognizable by the community of his followers. And his followers, in part, look to what we know of Jesus from the Gospels and the creeds. So, for example, the icon above, from Sinai, images Jesus, not because he takes the form of a 6th century Byzantine man, but because of the symbolism that teaches and points to Jesus: the two fingers pointed in blessing, the three fingers curled back as a symbol of the Trinity, the asymetry of his face that holds together both mercy and justice, the gospel that he holds that tells us where his story his written, etc.
You worry that icons could be an abstraction and a distraction. I agree, they could be, but they don’t have to be. To me they are concrete manifestations of the Jesus we hear about in the gospels and looking at them doesn’t distract any more than reading the gospels does. Rather, in seeing Jesus I better hear and know Jesus which compels me outward.
9 Jason // Nov 15, 2008 at 10:43 am
Isaac, you know how you’ve asked me in the past to post about why the photography thing has become such a hobby of mine and if there’s anything theological about it? I think this may be the rough sketch of what’s behind it
10 Chris // Nov 15, 2008 at 7:56 pm
If I may…
Isaac – your point about icons only being made after Christianity was legalized because there were no more martyrs was a good point (I literally said, “oh shoot” out loud). But I also think your points about icons and art going so far that ppl use them to avoid real reflection about God, that this particular icon has a white Jesus, and the idea if we have art we won’t go visit the ppl in prison all seem more psychosocial rather than theological. Surely the Old Testament prophets saw some images of God that couldn’t rightly be explained in words – although they tried and we have now because of that. But I wonder if Ezekiel had such a hard time explaining to the exiles that God was mobile on a chariot? “No, no guys, your not getting it, I saw God riding in this chariot and the wheels looked all crazy…” Do you think he tried to explain it, saw the people’s confused faces and said, “oh forget it just let me draw it in the sand…”
Even if more “accurate looking” icons (and i do use the term accurate lightly because I do agree with predominate white looking Jesus’ out there) came into play largely after Constantine, I wonder if they were started not just to make pretty pictures but to actually convey Jesus? Meaning, since I am sure not everyone was reading the gospels (the printing press didn’t come out till 16th century – just before Luther began writing – also considering that the gospels weren’t even written until between 50-90 CE) other means were used to preach the good news. So even if martyrdom did cease because of Constantine, the good news still needed to go on. So maybe those icons were needed not to depict a snapshot of Jesus but to tell people about Jesus. Just as much as, lets say, a Christian blog may tell people about the good news of Jesus…
11 isaac // Nov 18, 2008 at 8:06 am
This is good.
Chris, this point about iconography and the legalization was originally Jason’s point: “But when Christianity was legalized in the 4th century priests encouraged artists to create paintings …” But then he comes back and tells me that icons are part of the religious landscape before Constantine. I’ll defer to Jason on this stuff. I don’t know much about ancient iconography.
I also like your stuff about Ezekiel drawing pictures in the dirt. I just want someone to help me understand how folks get around the commandment against making images of God or creatures. I’m sure someone is seeing something that I don’t see. (Maybe you can draw me a picture in the dirt of how it all works out).
Jason, I’ll admit that I don’t know too much about this stuff. So I’m open to changing my mind. In fact, I don’t think I have an ‘opinion’ or conviction about icons. I just need some help in connecting the dots.
On Anabaptist iconoclasm… I’ve only done limited reading. This book is awesome: Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (2001), and it’s not very long. He turns the tables on accusations of iconoclasm during the Reformation. He argues that the destruction of images served the creation of new images: “such iconoclasm may be eclipsed by what we can call the iconopoiac energies of the Reformation, its creativity in producing new allegories and metaphors for the divine and the human” (6). So, towards the end of the 15th century and on into the 16th, there are a bunch of Catholics who hear the good news that they are no longer “slaves to the law.” They hear that there is “no lord but the Lord.” So they reject all the ways in which feudal lords and priests use the church to subjugate them. Peasant Catholics start trying to take back the church from the powers that enslave them. So they get rid of images and structures that tell them that all people are “brothers and sisters,” not masters and serfs. Matheson: “Perhaps what happened in the Reformation was that one imaginative architecture was replaced by another. The divine becomes more intimate, Christ as saviour rather than ominous judge; the human more earthy” (7). A popular new image among the commoners was the “bundschuh,” the peasant boot. Anabaptists are these kind of peasant Catholics.
The anticlerical movement of late medieval Catholicism shows how images are ambiguous. While they may have been used to tell the gospel to the illiterate, they were also used as a way to centralize power. The public buildings (and private estates) that possessed images were the places that controlled God’s relationship to the people. But this problem isn’t unique to icons. The same thing happens with Scripture and Eucharist—removed from the people, something only the priests could handle, not fit for the filthy bodies of the peasants. It’s no mistake that peasant Catholics turned to mystical traditions. One of them was called “the gospel of all creatures”—Christ suffers in all of creation. And when you an animal suffer, or when you yourself suffer, then you can see Christ. Those who suffer through slavish labor intimately feel God’s presence, just as Mary’s labor birthed Christ. Basically, medieval Catholics found Christ’s presence in toil and hardship and dirt and suffering. Images became another way for the authorities to control God’s power. So the people torched the images. That’s what I mean by saying that icons are ambiguous—it depends on who has them and how they are used.
Jason, say a bit more about what you think are “incidental” aspect of Jesus. I have no idea how to think through such decisions. Jesus’ penis is not incidental to the story if you take his circumcision seriously. Isn’t that essential to the story? It’s interesting that iconography of Jesus on the cross always covers his penis. Some argue that it’s because culturally accommodated Christians wanted to distance themselves from the Jewishness of Jesus—and to display his penis would be to have his circumcision staring you in the face.
12 Chris // Nov 18, 2008 at 9:57 am
You know, at first I was against this whole idea of icons because i have a large work of art by Mathias Grunewald over my mantle (“The Crucified”). It is the crucified Jesus and John the Baptizer pointing towards Christ (John 3:30). I enjoy it for several reasons. One is because it was rejected by the Catholic Church in 1515 because it depicted a very grotesque crucified Jesus. With its fine detail of Jesus’ bloody skin, his boils and bruises too protruding, and his neck and face show excruciating pain. Since it was not able to placed in the Church, it was placed in the entry way of a monastery hospital. The ppl that came to the monastery hospital were the ones with extreme diseases (mostly their to be comforted before they died). They put the art of Grunewald’s “The Crucifixion” in the lobby to show the ppl coming in that there also is another, a God in fact, who suffers physically as they do.
I think I like this piece of art because of the story behind it. I mean, Jesus being rejected by the Church because it wasn’t good-looking, it wasn’t appealing to look at, it wasn’t a Jesus we like to see… So, am i being a pro-iconist because i have an icon that represents a metaphor of a larger problem in the Church then (and certainly even worse today!)?
Other thoughts, the drawing of the Jesus “fish” (much like the same drawing we have on our bumper stickers) was used as a cross-cultural sign of peace. when people met each other on journey’s (and didn’t speak the same language) one would draw the top arch of the fish in the sand, and when the other person drew the completed arch on the bottom – they knew each other as brothers/sisters in the Kingdom.
Also – martyrs in antiquity were given the icon of a palm branch near or on their tombs to designate their martyrdom as one who followed the cross.
Lastly, I like trees. I painted a huge mural of one on my wall. I like the image of one large tree with a half-eaten apple on one branch and the crucifixion of the flesh of Christ on another. Life in the garden was taken away by the fruit on a tree, life was redeemed and given by the man that hung on a tree. Somehow, when I look at trees, something happens inside me – and this ‘feeling’ is directed by the remembrance of what I see in and through the Tree.
I need to look into this more because i feel also myself teetering on a fine line between admiration and necessitation
13 Emily Jones // Nov 22, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Hey Jason, just found your blog through Eugene’s… great stuff! I love what you’re saying about the icons. I’ve only been exposed to them a little bit, but my best friend is Orthodox, so I’ve thought about it a little more lately. I like where you’re going with it, and I wish that the Protestant church was more open to incorporating historical and mystical aspects of the faith like this. Maybe you can hang some on the wall at Quest? =)
14 John // Dec 16, 2008 at 10:41 pm
This site says all that needs to be said about the history of the institutional church as a would be world conquering power and control seeking scape-goat cult.
Such a scape-goat cult/meme is just as strong now in 2008 as it has ever been in any time in HIS-story.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com
But you will of course say that we are not part of what is described on this website. And I say bollocks because everything that you presume to “know” about Jesus, including the contents of the Bible, is informed or conditioned by the church as a very worldly institution.
Plus every aspect of your presumed body-mind personality is the result of the conditioning that you received (and still receive) from/by the “culture” at large in which you have grown up. Its “values”, its “knowledge”, its modes of pereception etc etc are ALL indelibly imprinted into the cells of your body and the patterning of your brain and nervous system.
Which version of “jesus” do you want as President?
The “jesus” as promoted by the Dominionists who want to create a theocratic (fascist) state!
Who would “jesus” bomb?
Some christians quite rightly say no one.
But on the other hand many christians are more than happy to bomb any and every one into submission to the West.
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