Preface

Abstract

Preface Michael C. Jordan, Editor We are in an odd position in relation to visual images. Technologists and entrepreneurs have invented and produced powerful devices of various types that enable us to summon to appearance images both still and moving from almost anywhere at almost any time. We are saturated with images. But are we generally attentive and responsive to the spiritual quality of images, especially considering that the human capacity to imagine and artistically render and preserve images seems to have emerged for spiritual purposes in the first place? I am thinking here of the words of Jean Clottes, a French expert in prehistoric cave paintings, who, when contemplating the images drawn on the walls of what is now called Chauvet Cave in southern France more than 30,000 years ago, summarized how he regards human beings in relation to our remote ancestors who drew these images: "Homo sapiens is Homo spiritualis."1 These words indicate that we find the origins of our kind in the capacity for spiritual experience rather than knowledge. Clottes disavows for himself any specifically religious claims, but when considering what we might now call the remarkable collected words in numerous caves completed in the Paleolithic age by our remote ancestors, [End Page 5] it seems right that we can discern something like spiritual ancestry in relation to the unknown artists or religious celebrants who painted these images. The cultural differentiation indicated by the terms "art" and "religion" makes it necessary for us to imagine the fusion of these concepts in an undifferentiated form that probably prevailed for the makers and users of these images. We live in a time in which we possess the technological capability of discovering, studying, comparing, reproducing, and preserving these images to an extent never before possible. But the ability to discern the spiritual qualities and purposes of these images is probably rare. Although we might think that the extensive knowledge of ancient and contemporary religious doctrine and practice in Christianity would place us in a position of ready responsiveness to Christian religious images, there is reason to believe that this is not generally the case. This point is made clear by Dominican theologian and historian of art François Boespflüg, who has recently published a monumental history of artistic images of God in the Christian tradition titled Dieu et ses images (God and His Images), which he calls in the title of his introduction "Une histoire iconique de Dieu" (An Iconographic History of God).2 Boespflüg asserts that God seems to have departed from contemporary art, that in European art of the second half of the twentieth century depictions of the crucified Christ are almost the only images of God to be found and that these depictions generally seem disconnected from the essential Christian affirmation of Christ as the Incarnation and the Savior, and that generally those contemplating these images are not inclined to make the same declaration as the centurion who, while gazing at Christ on the cross, exclaimed: "Truly, this was the son of God" (484). But the purpose of Boespflüg's book is not to bemoan this current cultural condition, which may, after all, turn out to be temporary. Instead, he recognizes that a number of confluent conditions make an iconographic study such as his possible today, especially the accessibility of an enormous number of images from across long periods of history and the possibility of easy consultation among [End Page 6] experts facilitated by the Internet, and the development of the disciplines of art history and theology such that the former no longer need restrict itself to analyses of provenance and style and the latter need no longer rely exclusively on written documents and linguistic sources in seeking to understand theological truths. Nor is it necessary to subordinate an iconographic history to biographical, political, social, and economic strands of historical change—artistic images can be understood as expressions of faith, and however contested and even sometimes interdicted such expressions might be, they form their own pervasive history and exist in a kind of communal relation to one another in ways that are often independent of other strands of historical change. This iconographic...