Last night I gave what was a highly summarised and heavily generalised talk on Christian Art. I felt very inadequate attempting to summarise the whole of Christian Art and to say something (anything!) meaningful about the huge variety of issues and approaches contained within it. I then felt even more inadequate answering questions afterwards (something I'm not particularly good at anyway) as the topic was so broad that the questions could have been on almost anything!
Anyway, the evening was fascinating. For me, primarily because it emphasised the different approaches often taken towards art in Christianity from those in Judaism and Islam. Graham Dixon from Faith & Image did remind us that for about 1,000 years all Christians did not represent God the Father and, therefore, shared with Judaism and Islam at that time the sense that God is beyond representation. However, representation has been consistently significant within Christian Art mainly, as I argued, because of the Incarnation; although representation does not have to mean realism.
The result has been that the Christian tradition has been broader and more liberal than the Jewish or Islamic traditions when it comes to use of visual imagery. This was reinforced for me in the questions and comments made after the presentations, where those speaking often seemed to make a words good, images bad distinction. A perceptive question, that followed comment along these lines, was whether words distract us from God. It was ultimately this question that prompted the following reflections from me.
There seem to me to be several issues with the distinction words good, images bad which the broader Christian approach on this issue has on the whole avoided. Having said that, I am, of course, well aware that Christianity has its own history of both destroying and renouncing images.
Firstly, images do have power and influence and this can be negative as well as positive. But so do words and, therefore, the distinction should not be words rather than images but examination of the positive or negative content of both. Second, in the Christian tradition 'the' Word is Christ, God as a human being, able to be seen, heard, touched, smelt and (even) tasted (when kissed by his mother or Judas, for example). In Christianity the 'Word' is visual and therefore the two should not be opposed. Finally, a word is not the reality which it describes (this is demonstrated by different words in different languages described the same reality); instead words re-present reality in a different form (i.e. language) and therefore, at base, do precisely the same thing as images (this is, of course, leaving to one side the argument that reality is formed by our perceptions).
As a result, there is a marvellous breadth to Christianity in this area of human thinking and acting. Christianity contains both the via negativa, which renounces images in order to find God, and the via positiva, which affirms images in order to find God. This, it seems to me, is wonderful and, in the context of this meeting, seemed a clear distinctive of Christianity.
To be fair, it was also pointed out in the questions and comments afterwards, from a Jewish perspective, that the third commendment does not have to be understood as prohibiting images per se but instead as prohibiting the worship of images. This is a distinction that Christianity has sought to maintain during the history of Christian Art (not always successfully) and could form a shared and much more positive understanding of images across the three Abrahamic faiths.
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John Tavener - The Lamb.
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