Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia

Encountering Traditions

by Natalie Carnes

Images increasingly saturate our world, making present to us what is distant or obscure. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present-from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversation that rejects an understanding of images as lifeless objects, this book offers a theological meditation on the ways images convey presence into our world. Just as Christ negates himself in order to manifest the invisible God, images, Natalie Carnes contends, negate themselves to give more than they literally or materially are. Her Christological reflections bring iconoclasm and iconophilia into productive relation, suggesting that they need not oppose one another.

Investigating such images as the biblical golden calf and paintings of the Virgin Mary, Carnes explores how to distinguish between iconoclasms that maintain fidelity to their theological intentions and those that lead to visual temptation. Offering ecumenical reflections on issues that have long divided Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, Image and Presence provokes a fundamental reconsideration of images and of the global image crises of our time.

Genres: Theology, Christianity, Nonfiction

253 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 12, 2017

Reviews

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sometimes dense and sometimes mesmerizing book proposes at the close of the introduction that it will prepare "us for greater ecclesial unity and perhaps even [goad] us one faltering step toward earthly peace." A high order indeed.

Carnes points out that the great traditions of Christianity--Orthodox, Catholic, & Protestant--remain divided over how they view images, so to solve this problem leads to unity. And she also richly introduces her topic by connecting it to the violence over images of Muhammad and how issues of images deeply affect the modern world.

Where she arrives in her final, splendid chapter, is that our desires are too easily satiated by the images we see and that we need to desire more. When we desire the Christ, for whom no image is exhaustive and who himself is the image of God, we become like Christ and therefore an image of God. We become "a cascade of images." She writes, "To see the world in this way--as an image of God--requires resisting the will to master the world. It demands, instead, opening the self up to the transformations love can accomplish."

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was unaware of this book's existence until a few days ago, but it articulates much the same dynamic around images as I have been exploring in my own recent thought and writing. What she describes as the interplay of faithful iconophilia and faithful iconoclasm, resulting in a "cascade of images" leading to God, is an outward expression of the cataphatic-apophatic dialectic of the Christian spiritual life. Carnes's affirming take on a type of iconoclasm will doubtless make Orthodox readers uncomfortable; she also focuses narrowly on visual art, placing traditional iconography on a continuum with controversial modern pieces. This is still a worthwhile book, and the first I have read that puts its finger directly on this pattern.