St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (review)

In medieval tradition St. John the Evangelist embodied multiple roles—the beloved disciple who leaned on Christ's breast at the Last Supper, the eyewitness of the Crucifixion; the adopted son of the Virgin who was himself a model of virginity and a figure of the contemplative life. He was regarded as the author of the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Revelation and the visionary theologian of the Incarnation and the Trinity. In a masterly survey, Jeffrey Hamburger reviews aspects of the iconography of St. John in medieval manuscript art from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, but focuses on a small number of unusual images which are here identified for the first time as depictions of St. John in the image and likeness of Christ. The surviving representations of John as Christomorph, an exemplar of human perfectibility, show him in various guises, such as the Logos-Creator, God in Majesty, and Wisdom incarnate.

Hamburger studies the images in relation to the theology of the imago dei and the exegesis of Jn 1:1–14, read in conjunction with other texts (notably Gen 1: 1, 26, Rom 8:29–30, Phil 2:7, Col 1:13–16, 1 Jn 3:2). Although he notes the absence of images of deification in Byzantine art, he relates the theme of the deified Evangelist to ideas about images and spiritual vision generated in early discourse on the Incarnation and the relationship between the divine and the human, the invisible and the visible. He eloquently argues that this theological discourse was crucial to the very formation of Christian art. More provocatively he claims that, "The path to God charted by John . . . is predicated on the possibility of the soul raising itself to God by means of its capacity to see" (p. 18).

The origin of a "theology of deification" is traced in the neo-Platonic theology of the Greek Fathers, which was transmitted to the West primarily by John Scotus Eriugena, from whom it passed into monastic thought in the twelfth century, and then to the Rhenish mystics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From his close knowledge of the relationship between art, mysticism, and the literature of visionary experience in the late medieval Rhineland, Hamburger provides examples of this tradition in a variety of sources, some previously unpublished. Two chapters are devoted to liturgical material, including the remarkable illustrated cycle for the Feast of John the Evangelist in the Gradual of St. Katharinenthal (1322), and to contemporary writing in which the idea of the eucharist as an expression and anticipation of unity between God and man is used in the rhetoric of divinization. Two chapters feature sermons, libelli, and visionary and contemplative texts, ranging from the Legatus divinae pietatis ascribed to Gertrude of Helfta, c. 1300, to the work of Meister Eckhart. Some of this material is also discussed in Annette Volfing's John the Evangelist in Medieval German Writing: Imitating the Inimitable (Oxford, 2001).

In isolating "the theology of deification" to explain the unusual iconography of a small group of images mostly produced in late medieval Rhenish contemplative houses, Professor Hamburger does not, perhaps, sufficiently make clear that this is but one of various discourses and ways in which medieval culture (including western culture before Eriugena) expressed the fundamental belief that in Christ humankind is transformed to participate in the divine life. For example, he briefly distinguishes "the theology of deification" from the theology of imitatio Christi, which he characterizes as focusing on the humanity of Christ, and from that of spousal union with God, which "deification" did not necessarily presuppose. Yet both these theologies give divinization a central place: in the Franciscan and devotio moderna traditions, one passes through imitation of Christ's humanity to share in his divinity, and in commentaries on the Song of Songs the bride is seen as becoming, through love...