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August 28, 2016
In a sense, our articles have actually been discussing sacred images all summer; we have been talking about the many aspects of one very particular sacred image: the church. The church building is itself a sacred image: it is the image of the Universal Church, the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, ordered into the Mystical Body of Christ. This is why its style and arrangement have been so carefully worked out by our architect. But sacred images, in the sense in which we usually understand the term (paintings, statues, etc.), have not yet entered into our discussion of our new church. We turn to them now, not as an “extra” or “afterthought” to the discussion of the church, but as an integral part of what a church needs for its own function.
“The discussion of liturgical imagery is not a question of nostalgia. Rather, it centers on the very nature of the Incarnation and the means by which the goodness of material creation becomes, in the Spirit, the bearer of revelation and the divine life that God desires to communicate to his creatures. Since [the Second Vatican Council] tells us that ‘in the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 8), one of the most important vehicles for perceiving that foretaste is the sacred image. As such, images are not extrinsic to the liturgy, but integral to it. Through images we see the Mass, just as through proclamation we hear the Mass” (Denis McNamara, Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy, 140).
But why is it that we can venerate images at all, considering God’s clear prohibition of them in Exodus? First, it’s important to note that God did not forbid all images (for instance, He commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent that would heal those who looked at it). In the case of the golden calf, the people of Israel certainly committed idolatry, but that was not the only problem: besides worshiping a lifeless statue, they attempted to make an image of a God who had not yet revealed Himself in that way. The time of images would only come with the revelation of Jesus Christ as Man: “In the Incarnation, Christ took on materiality and therefore established a precedent that could be followed by later generations: Christians could represent Christ because Christ chose to represent himself. Since it was clearly God’s will that Christ’s human body, made from the dust of the earth, be seen by human eyes, it followed logically that Christ’s image could continue for the eyes of succeeding generations in similar materiality. Moreover, in the Transfiguration, Christ showed his heavenly glory, intending that human beings see and understand his divinity and power. So the precedent was set for iconography that revealed a divinized human body” (McNamara, 141). As the Gospel spread from the Apostles and those who had seen the Lord, we cannot doubt that the first Christian communities wanted to know what Jesus looked like. As they sought to depict the Savior, they began to develop the theology of sacred images, which we will discuss in more detail during the next few weeks.