Charles Scribner reflects on the beginnings of Christian iconography, starting at the crib.
Ever since I was a schoolboy soprano, my favourite chorus in all music was Haydn’s triumphal setting of the opening of Psalm XIX, the climax of Part 1 of his Creation: “The heavens are telling the glory of God: the wonder of His work displays the firmament.”
Six decades later, this music still conveys, as no mere words can, the Creator behind Creation, just as Handel’s soprano solo in Messiah – “I know that my redeemer liveth” – redeems the suffering of Job as well as our own and points forward, as an aural prefiguration, to Christ the Redeemer, our Messiah. As the composer in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos proclaims, “Music is a holy art.” But she is, fortunately, in good company throughout that worthy endeavour.
When my older son, Charlie, was two years old, I took him to kneel before the crèche set up for Christmas at our parish church. Gazing in wonder over the finely carved figures of the Holy Family, the shepherds and the Magi gathered at the manger along with attendant animals, he finally sang out: “Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh!” My son may have mistaken the ownership of the farm, but he had no problem with animal iconography! Images speak with immediacy to the very young, as to us all.
I was reminded of another Charles, the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, whose magnificent translation to film I watched with my wife and newborn four decades ago. In one early, idyllic summer scene on the terrace at Brideshead, Charles challenges his eccentric and much-beloved new college friend Sebastian over the latter’s troublesome convictions as a Catholic. Charles (played to the hilt by Jeremy Irons in the television series) dismisses it as “an awful lot of nonsense”, but Sebastian retorts:
“Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”
“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”
“Can’t I?”
“I mean about Christmas and the star and the Three Kings and the ox and the ass.”
“Oh, yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”
“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”
“But I do. That’s how I believe.”
What brings us to the manger time and again? To the Mass? To faith? What about Sebastian’s claim to believe something because it is a “lovely idea”? Is that nothing more than the intellectual equivalent to his beloved teddy bear, Aloysius (named after the young Jesuit saint)? Is truth more likely to be lovely? A theological argument might be fashioned in favor of this “lovely idea” based on the claim in St John’s Gospel that God is both absolute Truth and absolute Love – an equation, as it were, that supports Sebastian’s point.
In retrospect, over the two millennia of Christianity, it appears that the Church implicitly adopted this notion insofar as it encouraged and commissioned artists to present its stories and theological claims in the most attractive and “lovely” fashions. By the time Christianity emerged free into the light of the Roman Empire, it decked itself and its core beliefs in the splendid raiment of visual art – architecture, painting and sculpture.
St Luke, evangelist and author of the Acts of the Apostles, was known to be a physician and hence became the patron saint of doctors and surgeons, as well as butchers and students – an arresting combination! But he is also the patron saint of artists, owing to an old tradition – unsupported by fact – that he painted the first icon, from life, of the Virgin Mary. Perhaps that honour should have gone to the Apostle Paul, for it was St Paul’s wildly successful mission to the Gentiles throughout the Roman empire that ultimately converted that empire and brought Christianity into the realm of its painters and sculptors – something that would have appeared alien to the first Jewish Christians, steeped as they were in the iconoclastic tradition of Judaism and its prohibition of “graven images”.
The pagan temples proclaimed their sacredness externally: the exteriors, facing the public, were sheathed in marble columns and adorned with brightly painted relief sculpture. The Christian basilicas, by contrast, were designed to house congregations that assembled inside to worship their God in a participatory fashion. Hence the rows of magnificent marble columns were moved inside to reinforce the ceremonial procession from entrance to altar, while the wall surfaces were dematerialised by glowing mosaics and frescoes and punctuated by windows to illuminate this New Jerusalem, a symbolic heaven on earth.
Imperial trappings of royal power were transferred to the worship of the new King of Kings. The emperor’s throne room became the hall of the New Emperor, Christ. Whereas a Roman emperor sat under a baldachin at the rear of his hall filled with adoring subjects, Christ appeared, liturgically, in the Sacrament under the baldachin or marble ciborium at the altar at the climax of each Mass. Altar replaced throne for this new heavenly emperor, who ruled from a cross. Lest there be any doubt, He was bedecked with full imperial regalia: Christ as Emperor, Pantocrator, Ruler of the World.
This is an extract from Charles Scribner’s Sacred Muse: A Preface to Christian Art & Music (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
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