Sanctifying Art. Deborah Sokolove

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Sanctifying Art - Deborah Sokolove


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worshipping them. In the early days of Christianity, as in Moses’ day and for the centuries in between, idolatry continued to be a present danger. As the followers of Jesus spread beyond Palestine into the wider Roman empire, many converts came from religious traditions that worshiped a variety of deities. These were understood to be present in their statues. Thus, some writers in the early church period were understandably skittish about representational imagery.

      This was not universally true, however. Since the discovery of the early third-century frescoes at Dura Europos, assumptions about a uniform, or even widespread, anti-image bias of the early church have been challenged. Some have pointed out that the lack of images in the first two centuries of Christianity may have had more to do with its status as a persecuted religious body with little money to spend on decoration and few buildings to decorate than with any ideological position. It is certainly true that as soon as Christianity became a state religion, its royal patrons arranged for elaborately embellished buildings, filled with portraits of themselves as well as various biblical and extrabiblical personages and objects.

      Nonetheless, the writings of early Christian theologians and preachers repeatedly circle around the issue of images and idolatry. This concern is not restricted to the visual arts, nor even to representation as such. As early as the late fourth century, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) wrote about his own struggles to keep his appreciation of music within proper bounds. Berating himself for loving the sound of the music more than the edifying words, and perhaps even more than God, he wrote,

      Abbot Suger extolled precisely the kind of elaboration that Bernard of Clairvaux deplored. His church at St. Denis is one of the earliest examples of what came to known as Gothic architecture. Such buildings featured pointed-arch windows filled with stained glass, ornate embellishments at every turn, and a lapis sky filled with golden stars on the ceiling over the altar. In his account of the building process, Suger argued that only the finest materials and workmanship were worthy for the service of God. As he wrote in his treatise, “De Administratione,”

      In response, Bernard somewhat grudgingly accepts that it may be all right for parish churches and cathedrals to revel in outward splendor. It does no harm, he admits, to the simple and devout, whatever problems it may pose for the vain and greedy. However, he points out, for poor, spiritual, cloistered monks such things are at best distractions and at worst invitations to sin. He goes on,

      In this short passage, Bernard summarizes an attitude that continues to resound in the church as well as the wider society. For Bernard and his spiritual descendants, art is too frivolous for serious people to fool around with, and much too expensive in both time and money when there are more important needs crying out for our attention. For Suger, however, through art and the light that art could reflect and reveal, God could be apprehended directly.

      Three hundred years later, the unresolved tensions over the appropriateness of the arts in Christian worship became evident again in the iconoclastic excesses of certain portions of the Reformation. While stories of whitewashed churches and disfigured statues are familiar, it is important to remember that there were significant differences among the various reformers with respect to the arts. Luther, for example, advocated leaving the churches as they were, converting the use of whatever religious art existed to didactic rather than devotional means. He was horrified to discover that Andreas Karlstadt had encouraged the wholesale destruction of religious statuary during his absence from Wittenburg in 1522. Zwingli, on the other hand, was, like Augustine, all too aware of his own tendency to get so carried away by music that he forgot about God and banned even hymns from the worship of his church.

      Despite these differences among the reformers and among the ecclesial traditions that derive from each, effective patronage of the arts was no longer seen as a legitimate role for the Protestant churches. The Roman Catholic Church did continue to commission important artworks for a long time. However, the widespread secularization of society in the ensuing centuries led to developments in serious visual art, music, and drama that made the practitioners of each of these art forms less and less interested in providing works that were appropriate for Christian worship and edification.


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