The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Image in Christian Tradition

The Art of God Incarnate proposes that visual art is a good way to think of how the incarnation--the central truth-claim of Christianity--can be said to reveal the divine. In the book of Genesis the human being fresh from the hands of the Creator is the image of God in the temple of the world. In an environment of distorted images the prophets sought to make visible by symbolic gestures the divine attitude toward Israel as well as looking forward to a new divine intervention to redeem history and transfigure human lives. For the New Testament faith this transforming intervention has come about through the restoration of the divine image in man. Jesus Christ is the true and living icon of the Father and the model from whose radiance human beings generally can be re-fashioned. Despite the anti-iconic legislation of the Hebrew Bible it was inevitable therefore that under the New Covenant a visual art would make its appearance since God had now made himself visible in his humanized Son. During the iconoclast crisis which shook the Eastern Roman Empire it was the achievement of the later Greek fathers to spell out this claim doctrinally. Modern aesthetics can throw further light especially by way of phenomenology and semiotics on how an artwork can be a communicator of meaning and truth. Finally there is the question of how human beings are to make their own this revelation of God in the visual realm. In the Latin tradition especially among the monastic teachers of the twelfth century the biblical theme of man made in the divine image and likeness was used to speak of how people can be changed by the fresh resources that revelation provides. Through growth in charity they themselves can become saints images of God.