Iconophilia

There is a tension inherent in the Christian tradition between the urge to glorify the Divine through art and the temptation for that same art to serve as a sort of substitute for the Divine. All too often we have put aesthetic concerns above truly spiritual ones. (Church musicians, I feel compelled to add, are far more susceptible to this sort of error, whatever our personal tastes.) Of course, the reason this mistake is so commonly made is because aesthetic experience is so easily mistaken for spiritual experience. It is the natural impulse of the artist to create beautiful things, and these beautiful things can effect a sort of transcendence within us. The problem begins when this aesthetic transcendence is mistaken for that different sort of transcendence which is truly spiritual.

Paul, preaching in Athens, touches upon this point:

For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.” Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

(That's Acts 17:28-29 (NRSV). Paul is quoting Epimenides's Cretica — which he cites also in his letter to Titus — and Aratus's Phaenomena; we see already the appropriation of Greek pagan imagery and language for the Christian God.)

As early as Paul, then, we see the impulse for iconoclasm, the reluctance to make physical objects that might take God's rightful place in the center of worship. (Indeed, this impulse is far older than Paul, dating back at least to those graven images Moses warned us against.) The easiest way to avoid the pitfall of worshipping the aesthetically beautiful is to destroy it. This explains why some Byzantines broke their icons and why Calvinists dismantled pipe organs.

But orthodox thought, in both the East and West, came to the conclusion that images aren't so bad: after all, God created the physical world and pronounced it good (whatever the Gnostics might tell you), and thought it so good that He took physical form. If Divinity itself might assume our mortal flesh, who's to say that we cannot appreciate the visible as signifier for the (invisible) Divine? Music, too, can remind us of the beauty of God.

The problem, of course, is when we forget that there is anything beyond mere art. This happens when we make the concert hall our temple, or — if we're at least so correct as to know what a proper temple is — when we put the quality of the Offertory anthem above the quality of our service to the poor. Both are offerings, of course: the sacrifice of praise is no less fitting than the succour of the needy. Both should proceed in equal measure from the well-formed soul. For further thoughts on "Art and the Motion of the Soul", I'll refer you to Peters.