“You Spoke in a Vision” (Ps 89:19): Iconoclasm, the Incarnation, the Aspiration of Christian Art

Among the aphoristic fragments of Leonardo da Vinci’s brilliant and tantalizing Notebooks appear the scattered makings later gathered as his multivolume treatise on painting.¹ After an extensive treatment in which one might learn everything from botany to the effects of aging, to the most arcane principles of perspective—even the moral precepts for a young boy’s proper discernment whether to follow a painter’s career—Leonardo speaks finally of the supremacy of his craft: “Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts.” Yet words, da Vinci insists, are weak. They lack, at least, some potent force found only in a picture. “Write up the name of Christ in some spot and set up His image opposite,” he says, “and you will see which will be most reverenced.”² The visual surpasses the verbal through the icon’s potent magnetism.

Without entering into this interesting debate about the relative excellence of the arts—on da Vinci’s measure, the film reel would surpass the brush, by pure power to captivate and attract—we may, nevertheless, agree on the unique allure addressed to our sense of sight. It is not by accident that Scripture warns against concupiscence of the eye, not of the ear (1 Jn 2:16). A reflection on the implications of the Incarnation on art might take this lust of vision as a profitable starting point.

The manuals of the post-Tridentine period generally identified concupiscentia oculorum as an impulse to acquire, the first movement of greed, leaving libidinous sensuality entirely to the so-called concupiscence of the flesh. Augustine, however, is a surer guide, I think, when he finds concupiscence of the eyes in the public’s insatiable eagerness for spectacles and shows, i.e. violence and erotic thrills.³ A glance at modern movie culture (I make a distinction here from cinema) is enough to confirm the timeless insight of Augustine’s analysis and to indicate that greed is, undoubtedly, not enough. The desire of the fallen human eye is coupled with some deeper, more dangerous lust: that primal cupidity that lured our first parents into their rebellion.

Sin itself first enters the world through the eye. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes and was desirable to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). The irresistible promise the fruit held was, moreover, in the Tempter’s words, that in eating it, “Your eyes will be opened.” With our first mother, our whole race profoundly longs, even to its own destruction, to have its vision satisfied and ever more expanded.

Now, in itself, this urge to see, to have our eyes opened beyond what we now behold, is very good. It belongs to the order of prelapsarian creation and sets the trajectory of our final destiny. We are intended, specifically, to enjoy a beatific vision: a sight of such ravishing beauty and delight that we will be divinized in the beholding. The Creator himself is the term of this avid lust at the base of our being, and such cupidity in its perfection is experienced as contemplative love. It is for this vision that Eve pined, that her eyes might be further opened. We are meant to be made wise, by beholding Wisdom itself, and finally thereby to become like gods.

Scotists and Thomists will, of course, disagree (as is their habit) on the essentially supernatural character of the human desire to behold God; and, though I’d rather not wade into this difficult controversy, I (as is my habit) prefer the Thomist line. We naturally desire to look upon God, for we innately recognize that, like the trees in paradise—like all the glory that still shimmers even through our damaged and dimmed creation—God too is supremely delightful to behold. We are naturally dissatisfied, however, with all those created analogies and images that keep our knowledge of God ever at a distance.

This simultaneous...