- Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity
Visuality has become a pronounced theme in recent years and in a variety of scholarly disciplines, focusing on such issues as the nature of seeing and being seen, representation, the visual character of texts, and the uses of visual evidence. Early Christianity has seen its share of exciting work in this regard from Jas; Elsner, Averil Cameron, Thomas Mathews, Frances Young, and Georgia Frank, to name but a few. Robin Jensen made her mark with her Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000) and makes another important contribution in this book. Jensen examines the issues and questions surrounding images in earliest Christianity, especially in the centuries just prior to the Iconoclast Controversy, asserting that the seeds of what would later become the orthodox defense of icons existed virtually from the inception of distinct Christian material culture, where visual images were used and appreciated. Immediately, however, a problem looms: how can an invisible God be portrayed in an image? This question constitutes the unifying theme of the work
Beginning with the first identifiable Christian art in the Roman catacombs (c. 200), Jensen offers in chapter 1 a clear and detailed description enriched with illustrations. Declaiming against the still sometimes asserted myth of primitive Christian aniconism, Jensen surveys the "idolatry problem" in second- and third-century texts and identifies the issue as connected to portraiture, not to figurative art in general. The portrait specifically was the locus of confusion between image and archetype, leaving it open to idolatrous insinuations. Only when these issues and problems receded with the decline of paganism, and new theological needs and issues arose within the church, did the "holy portrait" come onto the historical scene. This result was hardly inevitable. Chapters 2 and 3 present an excellent survey of the debate on the superiority of the visual or verbal portrait in classical antiquity, the forms and uses of Roman portraiture, and the doctrine of God's invisibility and ineffability in pagan, Jewish, and Christian literature. Jensen concludes that Christianity distinctively comes to hold a spiritual "salvific vision" of God as the summit of religion—a non-physical seeing "face to face."
From this, the author moves in chapter 4 to the use of visual metaphors for the divine in the fourth and fifth centuries and to another problematic aspect of the visuality of God: the divine "image and likeness" in which we are created. To cite an example, whereas earlier Origen insisted that both the vision of God face to face and the image and likeness were spiritual, Athanasius believed in the redeemability of the flesh and the importance of the senses. In addition, both he [End Page 405] and Basil used the imperial icon as a model of the divine unity of separate persons. As the threat of idolatry lessened, visual images and metaphors could be deployed to explain the nature of the Trinity and its interrelations. Jensen then surveys visual portrayals of God and the Trinity in this same period and discovers that anthropomorphic images of the Father evaporate at the end of the fourth century while portraits of Christ and the saints come to the fore. Though God remains invisible and ineffable, Christ and the saints have actual bodily form which can legitimately be depicted, thereby providing theological relief to the fear of idolatry.
Chapters 5 and 6 then focus on images of Christ and the saints, employing the same parallel treatment of texts and images employed so skillfully and successfully throughout the book. Jensen sees portraits of Christ playing a creative and dynamic role in the Christological controversies of the period as an intellectual and cultural force in their own right, not some mere "Bible for the unlettered." Similarly, she views the rise of saints' portraits as concomitant with the advent of saints' cults and relics, pointing to Paulinus, Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nyssa, who used ekphrasis of saints' images to construct new modes of piety.
Throughout the book, Jensen offers a conspectus of nearly all...