All of this occurred without reference to either the affirmations or the anathemas of John of Damascus and the fathers of the Second Nicene Council. There was in fact almost no discursive reflection or rationale, and surprisingly little scandal or controversy, as the scope of the representable in Western art expanded. So it is a little difficult to understand why these changes occurred. Any explanation is thus of necessity speculative, provisional, and incomplete. Three lines of thought provide rough explanations for these slow but steady changes, all of them converging on the intellectual developments in the West associated with the Renaissance. One line of thought is historical, one is scriptural, and one is philosophical and theological.
First, Lev, a Roman Catholic, argues that as the Middle Ages transitioned into the Renaissance, nature, the body, and human action came to be viewed with a dignity and an honor they had not previously been thought to possess. They thus became worthy sites of meditation in the language of art. As the dignity of the human person and the created order became more embedded in the social imaginary, it was no longer thought that to portray God the Father with a human body besmirched his dignity.
Second, according to the Orthodox theologian Fr. Steven Bigham, the “loss of the sense of typology between the Old and the New Testaments has serious effects even in the realm of art history.” With the emerging historical consciousness in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, “theology became subordinate to history.” The Old Testament was no longer viewed as a set of shadow symbols whose eternal reality is shown forth in full clarity in the New Testament, but as a record of historical events in the deep past. The appearance of the Son in the Old Testament, then, would more likely have been interpreted as an anachronism. This new understanding of the Old and New Testaments, at least in terms of typology, combined with the burgeoning desire among artists to daringly express visual frontiers hitherto unexplored. The Renaissance masters were more interested in expanding the threshold of representation than in remaining within the boundaries of tradition, giving rise in the end to a willingness—an eagerness, even—to clothe “the divinity with form and substance.”
Third, the Protestant art historian Matthew Milliner connects this willingness to depict the Father visually with Duns Scotus’s notion of the univocity of being. If God possesses the quality of being just as any other being does—if the Creator’s existence is in the same category as the existence of his creatures—then he becomes an object within “the sphere of knowledge.” Visual circumscription of the invisible God thus becomes thinkable.
Again, these explanations are very rough, and the last of them, at least, would be controversial among scholars. But whatever the interplay of cause and effect, whatever the mechanisms of change, something profound shifted underfoot over the course of five hundred years, and no explicit theological rationale was demanded or given. In the West by the sixteenth century, the prohibition against graven images seems to have been fully overturned.
So perhaps the Reformers had a right to be cranky. But they disagreed among themselves about the place of art in Christianity. Luther retained a positive role for images in the Church, relegating them to “adiaphora”—things indifferent to essential matters of faith. Calvin, of course, would brook no modulation of the commandment against graven images into the key of the new covenant. In his zeal to rid the Church of its abuse of divine images, he swept away not only the Western tradition of ecclesiastical art but also the distinction between veneration and worship enshrined in the Second Nicene Council. For Calvin, the human propensity for idol-making is simply too strong to be controlled by such sophistries. It is in his discussion of divine images that Calvin utters his famous phrase that the human heart is a “perpetual factory of idols.”
I disagree with Calvin’s assessment, but I’m not sure the current moment calls for a complete repudiation of Calvin or a blanket approbation of all images. In the list of topics on which the Orthodox and the Reformed don’t see eye to eye, the role of images has to be near the top, and I am not trying to make them agree. But I would like to hazard a deeper continuity, a pious inclination that both traditions recognize even if they finally come to different conclusions. Despite the embrace of iconography among the Orthodox, both parties at Nicaea II in the eighth century—and the Reformed Protestants in Geneva and Zurich nearly a millennium later—took as normative a former prohibition: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” To say that this commandment was overturned by the Incarnation is not quite right—not right at all in fact. The two bounds of divine representation articulated by John of Damascus and the Orthodox party in the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth century still pertain: the faithful are not to represent as God things that are not God; and the faithful are not to represent as God a God who is by definition unrepresentable. With the Incarnation, the invisible suddenly existed under the conditions of the visible. The second person of the Trinity became, in the words of Jaroslav Pelikan, “susceptible of portrayal.” But the Father did not.