THEOPHANY AND THE INVISIBLE GOD IN EARLY CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND ART

Robin M. Jensen*

Christianity emerged in a world that was well stocked with visual images of gods. A person living in the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity could not attend the theater, do business in the Forum, visit a public bath, or eat at the table of a wealthy homeowner without encountering statues, paintings, or mosaics that portrayed the traditional gods or goddesses.1 Early Christian teachers denounced those images as false, foolish, and even demonic, of course. The ubiquitous images of Mars, Artemis, or Isis and all the others for sale in the marketplaces were patently fraudulent in their view—and their proliferation evidence that the gods themselves were non-entities (in the same way that today’s multiplicity of shopping mall pseudo-Santa Clauses at Christmas time are clear proof of his non-existence). Even more troublesome than the traditional god and goddess images were the statues or likenesses of emperors set up for veneration. Early Christians, like the Jews prior to them, objected to these objects and determined not to succumb to demands that they offer sacrifice to representations, whether of gods or of human rulers. They took steps to cleanse themselves if they inadvertently came into contact with or passed by one of these images, and were barred from baptism if their professions put them into contact with idols.2 As we know from Acts, Paul’s address to the Athenians on the Areo- pagus (Acts 17.22–31) was prompted by his noticing that the city was full of such images for worship. Although he shrewdly complimented his audience on their religiosity, he went on to admonish them that the True God does not live in shrines, nor can be represented by

* Robin M. Jensen is the Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of theology, visual art and liturgy from the first century to the present, although her speciality is in the practice of in Late Antiquity. 1 See , Idol. 15; Spect. 11, for examples of this problem. 2 See Minucius Felix, Oct. 8.4; Ep. 31.7.1 and 58.9.2; Trad. ap., 2.16. 272 robin m. jensen the art or imagination of mortals. A little further on we read that when Paul came to Ephesus, he encountered the crass and materialistic protectionism of the idol makers who worried about a loss of sales if Paul were to convince people that the gods fashioned by their craft were not actually gods (Acts 19:23–27). Similar critiques of the popular and profitable practice of making, selling, and venerating images of the gods of the Greco-Roman world dominate much of subsequent early Christian apologetic literature. Often these attacks are characterized by scoffing and derisive comments about the absurdity of thinking such things have any life or power. Minucius Felix’s title character Octavius mockingly says to his pagan friend Caecilius: By sheer instinct, dumb animals have a much more accurate estimate of your gods: mice, swallows, kites are perfectly well aware than they have no feelings. They trample over them, settle on them, and unless you drive them off, they build their nests even in your god’s mouth. Spiders weave their webs over his face and hang their threads even from his head. And it is left to you to wipe, clean, and scour them, protecting, and dreading, gods you have made yourself . . . This is how covetousness has become enshrined in gold and silver; this is how empty statues have become hallowed forms; this is how Roman superstition has come into being.3 Despite their derision of the popular polytheistic practice of making images of the gods in metal, stone, or paint, these same Christian teach- ers had to acknowledge that most of the intellectuals of their acquain- tance also believed that the divine One is invisible to human eyes and beyond mortal comprehension—that the concept of a supreme God without form, name, or description was hardly a new idea.4 Many teachings of late philosophy did not actually oppose images, however, because they viewed them as functional or pious (often beautiful) sym- bols that pointed to higher and invisible realities beyond themselves. Plotinus, for example, believed that when artists studied the natural world, they discovered the order and structure apparent in nature, which in turn led them to the transcendent world of ideals and ulti- mately to experience pure intellectual beauty. Consequently, for Ploti- nus, works of art were not mere imitation of natural objects (that were

3 Minucius Felix, Oct. 24.9–10, in The Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix (ed. and trans. G. Clarke; ACW 39; New York: Newman Press, 1974), 94. 4 On the general subject of Christian aniconism, see Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: an Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).