Robin M. Jensen: From Idols to Icons

Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity, Christianity in Late Antiquity 12 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 252 pages, ISBN 9780520345423.

Depending on what Christian tradition one finds oneself in, the question of Christian art is a difficult and delicate topic. Are we permitted to have Christian art? Can we represent Jesus? What disposition should we have towards artistic representations of Jesus, the apostles, or Christian saints? Does any of this break the Second Commandment? How and why did the Christian church eventually permit the use, and sometimes veneration, of Christian art? This book, From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity by Robin M. Jensen seeks to answer that last question. Jensen is a seasoned and respected scholar of early Christian art and one could not find a more able guide.

Chapter one covers the earliest Christian critique of pagan idols in the second century. It boiled down to three criticisms: 1) the materiality of idols is contrary to God (i.e., wood decays; God does not), 2) the foolishness of worshiping lumps of clay (vs. worshiping God), and 3) the fact that these idols were attached to pagan gods (who were either nothing, so the idol was an empty sign, or the idol could be inhabited by a demon and so posed a real danger). In the first two objections, the early Christian critics of idols found a common cause with the philosophical critiques of Greco-Roman religious practices. Chapter two extends this discussion by addressing the invisibility of God. If God is invisible, how can God be visibly portrayed? More so, the Bible itself is full of images when talking about God. Are we, in the vein of Origen, Evagrius, and later with Theophilus in the anthropmorphite controversy, to seek “imageless” prayer? Jensen points out that this struggle is represented in how Christians would obliquely depict God the Father in their art by a hand coming from the clouds in heaven. Chapter three continues these threads by narrowing in on how early Christians wrestled with theophanies of God, specifically that of the Son. Does God revelation of himself in time and space permit us to represent that event?

Christians, Jensen shows in chapter four, most likely had artistic representations of some kind even as far back as the first century, only avoiding depictions of the Greco-Roman gods. When Christians began developing their own “material culture” by the third century, the artwork they commissioned was primarily narratival–depicting scenes from biblical stories–or symbolic. It was in the late fourth and early fifth centuries that the shift from narrative and symbol to portraits began to take place. With this shift also came, as explored in chapter five, debates about how to relate to such portraits of Christ or the saints. Were they vehicles facilitating a “face-to-face” encounters with the subject portrayed? By the fifth and sixth centuries, Christians felt they could honor such holy portraits while simultaneously distinguishing them from the person they represented. These debates naturally led to questions of how such connections between the subject and the portrait were possible (chapter six). Did it depend on the likeness between the subject and the portrait? Ultimately, the early Christians answered in the negative. As an aside, this chapter was the most interesting to me as she discusses and illustrates both the continuity and polymorphic representations of Christ in Christian art. Chapter seven rounds out the historical narrative of Jensen’s book by looking at the reported miracles associated with “holy portraits.”

Jensen concludes her book with a chapter (eight) pulling all the historical threads together into a concise and helpful analysis that answers the question from which the book takes its title: how did Christians move from seeing images as idols to icons? For Jensen, the conceptual developments of the fourth century are key, specifically the concept of participation which Christian theologians adopted and adapted from Neoplatonism. It can be easy to see such influence as a corruption of the faith, but Jensen avoids such implications, and those familiar with the intellectual climate of the fourth century are aware of how nuanced such appropriation actually was. Participation bridges the material and spiritual worlds; it connects vertically, if you will, our life on earth with the life in heaven, not in and of itself, but grounded in the incarnation of Christ. With these concepts in place and the shift from narrative to portraits, “icons” finally became possible.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this book is its brevity (excluding endnotes, the book is only 169 pages). Profound brevity is the mark of a true expert, and Jensen shows herself as such. The book is filled with many fascinating examples of early Christian art that Jensen expertly weaves into her narrative. Coming in at a list price is $65 (USD), which may be cost-prohibitive for some, one hopes a cheaper paperback volume will make this excellent work more widely available.

Reviewed by Ryan Clevenger

 

Publisher’s page: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/from-idols-to-icons/hardcover

Tags: christian art, early church, icons, idols, images, late antiquity, Robin Jensen, symbols

Category: Church History, Spring 2025