The predominant question in Natalie Carnes’ recent book is not in the assessment of criteria by which images may be classified as “art,” but whether images contribute to the edification of doctrine, specifically, in this case, the edification of Christological doctrine. In this sense, Carnes attempts to construct neither a theological aesthetics nor a history of Christian art. Rather, she considers creedal statements of belief in Christ through an exploration of images and their reception in order “to respond to images from a theologically formed imagination, recognizing the distinctiveness of their own modes of communication” (xii).
Images are undeniably powerful in the history of Christianity—some weep before an image, some react with revulsion, some react with a hammer—and all such reactions are found regardless of era, class, or culture. The ubiquity of strong response, from iconodule to iconoclast, transcends the idiosyncrasy of individual behavior toward a collective sensus fidelium. Such is fundamental to Carnes’ project to mine Christological import from these responses and reflect on the relationship between divine presence and divine absence in an image.
She begins this exploration of the interaction between iconoclasm and iconophilia with a discussion of the January 2015 attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Although Jean-Luc Marion considered these attacks emblematic of an Islam that has not opened itself to critique, Carnes fittingly notes the argument of Bruce Lincoln and Anthony Yu: critical self-reflection is internal to both Christianity and Islam, but expressed differently in each religion. Charlie Hebdo's “iconoclasm” mocked the weak, not the powerful: specifically, Islam, marginalized in traditionally Catholic France. Hence, the relationship between image-makers and image-breakers is not so much “us” versus “them,” but rather is far more complex. It is in that complexity that Carnes wishes to swim.
The first chapter, “Born of the Virgin Mary,” parallels visual art of the Maria lactans with Elizabeth Costello, the heroine of South African writer J. M. Coetzee's short story, “The Humanities in Africa.” The focus of the parallel is the image of the female breast and the intricate interplay of “literalized” and literal desire. Carnes takes us on a tour of what she names as a multiplicity of meanings, from eros to caritas, sexuality to nourishment. She then applies these interlocking meanings to pre-Chalcedonian Christology, asserting that Nestorius’ “heresy” stemmed from “mother-denial,” “when fear overrules hope” (30). Some of this is hard to follow, such as when she uses “God” and “Christ” interchangeably. She also returns to the Charlie Hebdo controversy, with detours in the piety of Macrina, Hamlet, and pornography. The problem here is not a lack of imagination, but perhaps the lack of a clear pathway through the complexity.
The next chapter, “Came Down from Heaven and Was Made Human,” is more successful, weaving discussions of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Flannery O'Connor's “Parker's Back” with Fra Angelico's Annunciation of Cortona. Her analyses of these stories is engaging, and her argument that images must be subject to “an iconoclasm of fidelity” to avoid “becoming objects, idols, or illusions” (76) is antecedent to realizing that the image cannot contain the divine, even while it may mediate divine presence.
Chapter 3, “Crucified, Died, and Was Buried,” is guided by Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, where “Christ's rivenness and rivingness come together. As they are bound to one another, so are Christ's impassibility and vulnerability” (89). Carnes discusses the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation as that which “repeats crucifixion” (93). She argues, “Iconoclasm does not (just) destroy an image; it creates images of destruction” (94). Chapter 4, “Rose Again on the Third Day,” is guided by the contemporary Icon of the Myrrh-Bearing Women by Vladislav Andrejev. She discusses the resurrection as that which “orders the world to a new, invisible reality that saturates and transfigures the visible” (125) and so is iconoclastic when “[t]he risen Christ has passed through this abyss and comes through it unrecognizable to his friends” (123). The final chapter, “Will Come Again in Glory” returns to the theme of desire from the first chapter through the notion that all desire—literal and nonliteral—“can open to Christ's desire” (155).
Image and Presence offers a creative and original journey through the power of images to reveal the dynamic between the presence and absence of God, but often is lost in dualistic thinking—the lure of Nestorius, perhaps—in her zeal to make all images and all desire refer to Christ.
