In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch described the source of the divergence in forms of art routinely displayed in Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches. The major Christian denominations disagree about a wide range of matters of doctrine and practice, about which they have argued for many centuries, and one area of dispute concerns the appropriateness of certain objects and images in places of worship. MacCulloch pointed out that the varieties of church practice with regard to the display of images stem from differences in the interpretation of Hebrew scripture, in particular disagreements about whether, in the Book of Exodus, the first commandment is really comprised of two commandments, or, to put the contrary view, whether the second in not really a commandment at all, but only a coda to the first.
The Orthodox church – following the teaching of Origen – consider the first commandment to be clear and brief: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). The second commandment, in their judgement, consists of the injunction against the making of graven images, “or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20.4). This view of the ordinal structure of the text is shared by the Jews (whose ancestors wrote the text) and the Reformed Protestant churches. However, Catholics and Lutherans consider the verse about graven images to be merely a development – an explication – of the previous verse, namely the first commandment, which is not brief at all but comprises a broad injunction against idolatry in its various forms. For them, the second commandment can be found at verse seven, and consists of the injunction against taking God’s name in vain. To maintain a full set of ten commandments, they discern two separate prohibitions against covetousness in verse seventeen of the text.
It would be easy to laugh at the fact that the Christian churches cannot agree on something so basic as the answer to the question, ‘what ten things are forbidden by the commandments?’ Except that, all Christians agree on the same text and the various things it forbids, which as it happens amounts to more than ten things on any reading. What they dispute is the numbering system. (Wars have been fought over less).
MacCulloch observes that historically, those churches that consider the ban on graven images to be commandment 1B, rather than commandment 2, have tended to take a more permissive view about the place of representational and figurative art in churches. For which reason, the Catholic church and its leaders have been one of the greatest sources of patronage of the visual arts in Europe during the past two millennia; and the Lutheran churches, starting with Luther himself, were more relaxed about displaying art in their churches and using art in their educational and evangelical activities than were the Swiss or Scottish Protestant churches, which took their lead from Zwingli, Calvin and Knox.
By contrast, the Orthodox church – along with most Jewish synagogues – continues to uphold the ban on graven images. However, the various national Orthodox churches have always taken the word ‘graven’ very literally. ‘To grave’ means to dig out, to carve, or to engrave, that is, to create an image in three dimensions. Sculpture and relief work in wood or stone are therefore not permitted in Orthodox churches since they are clearly prohibited by the second commandment. But paint applied to flat surfaces – creating representations in only two dimensions – is acceptable, since these are not ‘graven’, for which reason Orthodox churches are full of icons. Any many of these are beautiful, for surface flatness is no obstacle to brilliance of design nor to abundance of colour.
Last week I went to see a major retrospective show of Andy Warhol’s work, currently installed at Tate Modern in London. Warhol was the twentieth century’s preeminent painter of icons, in both senses of that word. He painted those people and objects that had become the representative and sacred symbols of the culture – coke bottles, soup cans, Marilyn, Jackie, Mao, drag queens – and he painted them flat. The lack of perspective in his painting is not a distortion, not a failure of technique, but rather a consequence of his practice of painting flat images of flat images: rather than three dimensional objects, he drew his source material from advertising images of branded foods, newspaper photographs of famous people, film stills and photo snaps. Warhol is not a cynical artist, like many of the conceptual artists working in London today; he does not toy with his audience, by taking the trivial and pretending that it becomes meaningful and valuable because it has been touched by the hand or the mind of the artist. He faithfully reproduced modern life in its two-dimensionality knowing that for many people their experience of the world comes primarily from the screen or the page.
Whereas once, idolatry consisted it confusing a three-dimensional physical object for the disembodied divine spirit, today it consists of embellishing the flattened representations of reality that mediate our experience of the world. Once it was an ontological error, now it is a semantic mistake. We no longer substitute the creature for the creator, but rather we attend to the signifier instead of what is signified. The totem has been replaced with the simulacrum: this is the magic of modern life.
The great schism in Western Christianity during in the sixteenth century, known as the Reformation, had many social and economic causes, but the battles were often fought out over theological doctrines, including the question of substance. At Communion, the church’s regular commemoration of the Last Supper – which, co-incidentally, was another image on display at the Warhol show, in this case his vast canvas consisting of sixty screen-print copies of an encyclopaedia facsimile reproduction of an engraving, based on the da Vinci painting – does the bread literally become the flesh of Jesus, and does the wine literally become his blood? Does the substance of these worldly items – flour, water, grape juice, and sugar – change during the service into human matter, more specifically human matter which is at the same time divine matter? Or are these things merely symbols, helpful in pointing us beyond quotidian questions of bodily sustenance to more important matters, namely to the redeeming power of sacrifice? Much the same might be asked about art: do splashes of oil on canvas become intrinsically valuable in a commodified world, simply by the trans-substantial act of recognition of their worth by the leading players of the art community? Or are they signs, of a special and enigmatic character, that point us beyond the everyday to values of a different kind?
Warhol was a true believer and his colours are great. Today his works hang in all the temples of culture around the world. He is the pope of pop, the patriarch of the new orthodoxy in art. But the brilliance of his work cannot disguise the problem that some of us crave another dimension. We want something in our lives more substantial than the tinned soup of modern art. We want a message that is more than its medium. We also want an ethics that is more than a list of prohibitions. We want to know how we should live, not just what we should not do.
I doubt that we will find the answers in a factory, any more than we will find them in a temple, however decorated. While we are searching, meanwhile, I recognise that there is much pleasure to be had in the presence of iconic images, graven or otherwise. Next week, Titian at the National Gallery.
lovely