left: Nativity scene, Novogorod School, 15th century (21”x 17”). right: Christ, the Law-Giver, sixth century (33” x 18”)
tree!” She drives Obadiah Elihue from the house with a broom. The story ends with him leaning against a lone pecan tree, “crying like a baby.” Parker may seem the more sympathetic character in this tale, but one shouldn’t dismiss Sarah Ruth’s outrage. A certain objection to the notion that we can presume to see the divine is arguably a prime ingredient of the Christian tradition. The Old Testament contains express prohibitions against images of the divine, as in Exodus: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above. . . . You cannot see my face. No one can see my face and live.” In the New Testament, we are told in the gospel of John, “No one has ever seen God.” And the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, the tradition that I belong to and know best, says that God is “beyond description, beyond understanding, invisible, incom-
prehensible.” We cannot see God, and the presumption to see God is a deep violation of the Judeo-Christian revelation. Point to Sarah Ruth. But if our relationship to God must always transcend seeing, it also transcends not-seeing. Alongside the Old Testament’s prohibition on images, there are accounts of the presence of God rendered somehow visible. God leads the people of Israel out of Egypt under a cloud by day and fire by night, and the prophets are given visions of the heavenly throne. In the gospel of John, Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” In our own time, the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion speaks of two ways of visually encountering the divine. One way he associates with the idol and the other with the icon. An idol claims to fulfill the human gaze that seeks the divine. But, he writes, “The gaze can never rest or
paintings (from left): Gallerie di Palazzo Leoni Montanari; Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai
settle [on] an icon; it always must rebound upon the visible, in order to go back in it up the infinite stream of the invisible.” the earliest christian art, such as that found in the catacombs in Rome and other locations, tended to be symbolic, pertaining especially to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, as represented by the ark, for example, and the lamb. From these beginnings grew a more representational art, which by the fourth century led to the relatively widespread display of icons—images of Jesus and of various saints—in churches and public places. Enthusiasm for icons was fanned in 451, when the Council of Chalcedon declared Jesus Christ to be both divine and human, “without change, without division, without separation,” thereby affirming the integral humanity of Jesus. By the seventh century, however, the
w i n t e r 2011 v b c m
29