The liceity of images and their place in the worship of God has been the place of upheaval and debate in the history of the People of God. Christianity’s restlessness to overcome the seeming paradox between the Old Testament’s ban of sacred images and God coming in the flesh in the New, reached a highpoint during the eighth and nineth century iconoclast controversy. In the modern age, we face a revival of iconoclasm but under a different guise. Rather than smashing images, moderns have trivialized the truth of the image, as image, through the profusion of kitsch sacred art. I will here argue that this “neo-iconoclasm” calls for a renewal of the basic principles set forth by the Fathers in response to iconoclasm. Following the letters of John of Damascus, I will explicate the basic principles of the Father’s teaching on the nature of the image and the importance of images in Christian worship. I will then introduce what I mean by “kitsch” and develop how the application of Damascene’s principles governing images rebuts this modern current.

John of Damascus and the Defense of Images

Byzantine Emperor Leo III had ordered the destruction of icons throughout the Byzantine Empire in AD 726. This imperial ban lasted until 843, when the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”, restored the veneration of icons. In response to these eighth century Christian iconoclasts, John of Damascus prepared three brilliant defenses to secure the future of sacred art at the service of divine worship.¹

The iconoclasts position themselves against the material and cosmic world. Recalling the mosaic law they recount, “you shall not make any carved likeness, of any thing in heaven above or on the earth below” (Deut 5:8), and “all who venerate carved [images] shall be put to shame” (Ps 96:7). Indeed, the object of our veneration is God alone, for there is one God who is a trinity of persons. John argues that we show honor to the created order not for the sake of venerating creation, “but [to] venerate the Creator, created for my sake, who came down to his creation without being lowered or weakened, that he might glorify my nature and bring out communion with divine nature.”² This line of argument reveals that our audacity and boldness to make images which depict the invisible God is founded in the belief that God himself became visible. There is a Christological argument at work. The Son took flesh, he clothed himself in a corporeal nature. Therefore, matter is taken up by Divine initiative not only for God’s glory but for the sake of putting man in communion with his Divine nature. The Incarnation sublimated the Old Law.

Those who would reject the veneration of the Creator and incarnate Son through the created world misunderstand the nature of the image. “An image is a likeness depicting an archetype, but having some difference from it; the image is not the archetype in every way.”³ This can be exemplified in the perfect natural, or more literally naked, image: the Son.⁴ The Son shows in himself the Father. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” the Lord says to Philip (Jn 14:8-9). The Son is like the Father in every respect save being the Father. The Son is not the Father, yet he possesses the fullness of Godhead; the Father has given everything to the Son. This is true in an imitative way for all fathers and sons, but the eternal Son is the originate and perfect natural image. He is the naked image of the Father.

Even before the Incarnation, matter was created good and is by nature an image of divine goodness. John sharply reprimands the iconoclasts, “You abuse matter and call it worthless. So do the Manichees, but the divine Scripture proclaims that it is good.”⁵

Now, subsequent to the Incarnation, this principle holds true and is fulfilled. Speaking of himself in the first-person, John of Damascus writes, “I reverence therefore matter and I hold in respect and venerate that through which my salvation has come about, I reverence it not as God, but as filled with divine energy and grace.”⁶ From this vantage it is possible and necessary to make a distinction between the image and matter. Matter, uninformed by the archetype, does not carry the weight of the latter which calls for veneration. Only in communion with the archetype and bearing its pattern, does a material image call for our veneration of the glory and memory of its archetype. For example, John points to the cross.⁷ The cross is for Christians a banner of the cause of his or her salvation. To distinguish between the image of the cross and the material in which the image comes to us, he asks: “If I venerate the image of the cross, made of whatever wood, shall I not venerate the image of the crucified one, showing the saving wood?”⁸ He emphasizes further, “that I do not venerate matter is plain. For once the pattern of the cross is destroyed, and (say) it is made of wood, then I will consign the wood to the fire.”⁹ In this it is clear that matter is not the final object of our veneration but the proximate end because it bears the form of the archetype, who is worthy of veneration.

Images cannot be self-referential. Their essential meaning is the communication and sharing of the glory which they bear as a participation in the archetype. If they are divorced from the archetype they lose their weight as an image. Images on their own, “are not worthy of veneration, but if the one depicted is full of grace, then they become participants in grace.”¹⁰ The generosity of the archetype to allow the image to participate in it, is further communicated and shared with those who encounter the image. There is generosity flowing through the image at every stage, and this generosity is the medium which establishes a communion.

Sacred images: of the saints, of the Virgin, of the Son, make manifest the ecclesial memory of what God has done for the salvation of his People and how the power of his Incarnation is still operative in the lives of the Saints. We behold Christ clearly in the memory of images and words.¹¹ Even the retelling of the lives of the saints draws an image. They incorporate us into the living memory of the Church.¹² The “forms of the saints… are open books, venerated for the remembrance of God and his honor.”¹³ The ecclesial memory of the saints is significant because it evokes the incarnate God as he lives in history, as he operates in the lives of those who have responded to his call of love to be one with him. Subsequently, the rejection of images, which is an attack on the portrayal of God’s glory in history, is an attack on the saints. It is the saints who constitute the joy and the glory of God.¹⁴ John claims that is a lie of the devil to say that images are unnecessary or forbidden. Out of envy the Devil leads us to believe that images detract from divine Glory. But it is he who “does not wish his defeat and shame to be spread abroad, nor the glory of God and his saints to be recorded.”¹⁵ He knows that “we see the likeness of our master and are sanctified by him… we see his miracles and recognize and glorify the power of his divinity.”¹⁶ There is a weight imparted to the image which demands our honor. The image does not demand this on its own terms, but on the ground of the one who is depicted. Were images to not be extensions and real participants in the glory of the archetype, the devil would not be so active in the removal of images from the worship of God. In fact, the image is not some optional feature of our worship. The image, in virtue of its participation in the archetype, calls for our veneration of the one who is depicted. “He who does not honor the image does not honor the one depicted.”¹⁷ For by honoring the image we are led through it “to the supreme beauty of the spectacle of the archetype.”¹⁸

Thus, sharing in the ecclesial memory manifest through images, we are placed in communion with the divine nature. Christ became incarnate and “so…the flesh became the Word without losing what it was, being rather made equal to the Word hypostatically.”¹⁹ Without being weakened, the eternal Son took flesh so that “he might glorify my nature and bring about communion with the divine nature.”²⁰ Therefore, “human beings do participate in and become sharers of the divine nature” insofar as they drink his flesh and drink his blood.²¹ Their lives become a sharing in his flesh which is hypostatically united to the divine nature. To share in the memory of the saints who have become partakers in his flesh is to encounter the memory of Christ in an ecclesial sense. The lives of the saints is the life of Christ as extended and shared with the Church. Following the hierarchy of images as building upon one another so that we might be placed in communion with the Archetype, which is in a final and ultimate sense the divine nature—we arrive at an understanding of memory manifest by images in color and word as the immediate mediation of communion with the Divine.

Kitsch: Neo-Iconoclasm

A word of German origin with supposed Yiddish influence, “kitsch” is described by the philosopher Roger Scruton as “an attempt to have the spirit of life on the cheap.”²² It is an attempt to arrive at affective responses without undergoing the real tragedy, triumph, or situation which elicits such responses. Authenticity is lacking in kitsch because there exists no substance, no archetype to be perceived through and in the image, thus the kitschy image only stands for the affective response to be elicited in the viewer. Scruton identifies the earliest examples of kitsch in the religious sphere. This origin seems fitting given that the highest activity and transcendence possible for the human person—that is, communion with the Divine Nature—takes place through the sacred image. Therefore, the triviality which infects the modern understanding of art and of beauty attacks images at their foundational meaning and place in human life: worship. It is my contention that this trivialization is a neo-iconoclastic in so far as it is an impediment to true worship. Still, there is a subtlety which exists in this “neo-iconoclasm.” Images are not attacked in a direct manner. The jealousy of the devil, identified by John of Damascus, has taken a new form in the undercurrent of triviality which divorces image from archetype and from the source of its glory and power.

In his study on aesthetics, Dietrich von Hildebrand identifies kitsch amongst other forms of triviality in art. For Hildebrand, we understand why someone who has lost his mother, to whom he was very devoted, is sad. However, there are other cases in which a similar response is elicited by a trivial object. When a trivial object evokes a response which it is not due, it can only do so in an artificial way. It acts as an imposter.²³ If an image is devoid of its essential character of generosity, and role as the medium of communion, it lapses into the kitsch. The image is trivial because it lacks depth or portrays itself having a pseudo-depth. In the religious sphere, kitschy imagery aims to elicit emotions for their own enjoyment rather than for the sake of aiming our affections at God.²⁴ One example of this sort of kitsch can be found in the work of Warner Sallman. Take for instance his “Jesus of Nazareth” 1959. Christ’s depiction does not raise us to contemplation of the awe and majesty of God, but of our own soft sentimentality.  This “fatal enjoyment” is the antithesis of the image in its true sense.

Alterations in the form of a beautiful piece of music in further instances or copies can cause it to lapse into triviality and tastelessness.²⁵ Examples of such alterations can be easily discovered by entering most religious bookstores (i.e. the conspicuous placement of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on a men’s tie, audacious renditions of the sacred heart with neon or bedazzled accents, etc.). As we saw above with the distinction between form of the image and matter, when the form of beauty is adjusted, the matter does not bear what it did previously. Failing to place the viewer in communion with the archetype, the image fails on a fundamental level as an image. However, one wouldn’t term this adjusted and altered piece of music as “ugly”. This piece of music, or some other artistic expression—be it literary or painted—does not utter an outright “no” to the archetype, to beauty. Rather, it presents itself as a fake. The image is given as an alternate to the real—to the archetype—rather than as a participation in the latter. In this way it promenades as an alternative in which one might as well have the pseudo-image instead of the archetype.²⁶

This “choice” made by the artist — that the image could just as well reflect the archetype or not — is foreign to the nature of the image as presented by John of Damascus. The image is not in competition with the archetype. Indeed, if the image is given as such it devolves into selfishness; it points only to itself and does not serve as a medium for authentic communion. As we saw above, the essential meaning of the image is the communication and sharing of the glory which they bear as a participation in the archetype. The glory of the image, its splendor and radiance, is only engendered by its profound participation in that which lies beyond it.

While it remains true that images awaken devotion in those who encounter them, they do so in a fundamentally different way than pseudo-images, such as the kitsch. One such example of this distinction can be seen in artificial flowers.²⁷ Artificial flowers are fakes in a negative sense. They give the illusion of beauty but there exists no validity or depth to their claim. The beauty of flowers seems to derive from their fragility, from the generosity of their blossom, and their fragrance. Imitations which capture the bouquet on the level of visible materiality alone lose this essential characteristic. That which makes the blossom valuable — the “kenosis” of its bloom which will soon wither and fade, for the sake of reproduction and the communication of its fragrance for the pollination of its fruit, is missing. Yet that which makes artificial flowers kitsch and trivial is not necessarily present in other representations of flowers.²⁸ Other art forms capture their floral form and give it enduring existence without claiming to fill their space. These non-trivial images have regard for the distinction between image and the real. They regard the real as that which they are communicating.

Conclusion

In light of the modern predicament in which kitsch and trivial art exists in proliferation in liturgical settings there exists a need to recover the sage wisdom of John of Damascus. Sacred art ought to be raised to the standards set forth in his three treatises on images. The image is not about the re-enfleshment of the archetype so that the archetype might be self-referential or opaque; but so that the incarnate Son might communicate his power and glory throughout all times and history. The Son’s descent into the flesh and into history, to learn from Ratzinger, “is intended to draw us into a movement of ascent. The Incarnation is aimed at man’s transformation through the Cross and to the new corporeality of the Resurrection.”²⁹ Sacred images participate in the generosity of the first natural image. There is a movement through images to draw all peoples and times into participation with the Image par-excellence. Progressing through the hierarchy of images we are being led to participation in the divine nature. Kitsch is a fresh attack on the truth of the image. It undermines the image at its dialogical core. Surrounded by such imposters, modern men have forgotten the truth of the image. The response to iconoclasm was an affirmation that the icon bears within itself that which is beyond itself. Images on their own, “are not worthy of veneration, but if the one depicted is full of grace, then they become participants in grace.”³⁰ With confidence let us recover the glory of God communicated and shared with his images.³¹ Let us hold our sacred images to that same standard which was raised in the eighth century, condemning the self-glorification of the image and demanding the glorification of the incarnation, communicated and shared in the ecclesial memory of the Church, through our icons on canvas, in story, and in stone.

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