Image and Presence

A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia

Natalie Carnes

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781503604223, 9781503600348
• eBook ISBN: 9781503604230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

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.

1

BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY

Arriving Presence

THE WOMAN IS FAIR and dressed modestly. Her head is covered, her hair pulled back, and her heavy dress obscures the contours of her body. In her left hand, she holds her breast, high, conical, and exposed to the nipple. Poised to nourish the plump infant on her lap, the breast occupies the woman’s gaze and partially blocks the face of the infant, whose lips part to take it even as his eyes remain locked on the viewer. He is naked, and the generous folds of his large baby body testify to the quality of the nourishment he has received.

The image is Lorenzo di Credi’s Madonna and the Nursing Christ Child, painted some time before di Credi’s death in 1537. It is one of many visual depictions of Maria lactans, which became a popular subject beginning in the fourteenth century. Another, painted by Antonio da Correggio around the time of di Credi’s, is Madonna of the Milk (1524). Set in the high contrast of a dim background and luminous figures, a dark mantle slips from Mary’s shoulders as she finds an opening in her red dress for her breast, held by a hand that supports her breast without covering it. The infant for whom she holds the breast also exposes his nakedness as he opens his body for the viewer, letting the white blanket fall free to confirm his maleness.¹ With one hand on his mother’s body, just above her breast, the infant turns his head to follow the reach of the other arm toward the naked cherub at his side. Perfectly at ease interacting with the angelic world, it seems the infant will nevertheless turn in a moment to receive life from the human one.

Madonna of the Milk is, following his painting of Mary Magdalene, Correggio’s second depiction of a woman’s exposed breast, and it is not his last. In the following year, he finishes a naked Venus and a few years following that, bare-breasted mythological figures of Danae, Leda, and Lucretia, as his corpus moves from mostly Christian to mostly Greek and Roman scenes. The two Marys’ nakedness seem to make a way for Correggio to depict the nakedness of other women, a nakedness that is more complete and more sexually charged.²

By the eighteenth century, even as nude images had become more common generally, images of Mary nursing the Christ child had all but disappeared.³ How and why Maria lactans disappeared is, like most histories, complex. An anxiety about nudity in painting is registered in the final session of the Council of Trent (1563), which expressed worry about the possibility of “lasciviousness” and “beauty exciting to lust.”⁴ Nearly 450 years later, in summer 2008, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano ran two articles calling for the artistic rehabilitation of the semi-nude nursing Mary. The authors wanted to move beyond what they saw as Protestant-inflected anxiety that such images were unseemly.⁵

That same year, in December—the month that includes the feast days for the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Immaculate Conception, and the Nativity of Christ—the cover of Playboy in Mexico ran an image of a woman named Maria, set in front of a stained glass window, draped in a white cloth covering her head and partially exposing her breast, with one hand cupped toward the breast as if to point to it. The headline read, “Te Adoramos, Maria.” Many Catholic officials and laypersons, including the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, publicly voiced offense. Playboy Mexico apologized but denied the image depicted the Virgin of Guadalupe or any other religious figure.⁶

. . .

Reflecting on Correggio’s Mary, writer J. M. Coetzee’s heroine Elizabeth Costello remembers baring her breasts for Mr. Phillips to paint.⁷ The memory is occasioned by an argument with her sister, Blanche, now Sister Bridget, whom she has recently seen for the first time since their mother’s death. Sister Bridget is a religious of the Marian Order who administers the Hospital of the Blessed Mary on the Hill, called Marianhill, in Zululand. They argue about the Greeks and Sister Bridget’s version of the Christians, who stand for humanism and anti-humanism, respectively. Elizabeth contrasts the beautiful bodies depicted by the Greeks and the Greeks’ broad development of the human to the Gothic ugliness of the crucifix and the narrowness of vision she sees encouraged by Blanche. (Sister Bridget remains “Blanche” in Elizabeth’s narration.⁸) The sisters part ways, with Blanche getting the final word, making a case against the Greeks based on their rejection by the people of Zululand and “ordinary people” the world over. Ordinary people want a god familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief, she claims.⁹ Blanche maintains that if Elizabeth had put her hope in a different Greek, Orpheus instead of Apollo, she might have had a chance, but she lost because, in Blanche’s estimation, she went for the wrong Greeks.¹⁰

A month later Elizabeth sits down to write a letter in reply to her sister’s argument. Answering Blanche’s charge that she has forgotten the Greek Orpheus, Elizabeth claims, implicitly, that Blanche has forgotten her Order’s namesake, Mary. She tells a story aimed to depict and advance a kind of humanism found, not exactly in the Greeks but in the Greek-inspired Renaissance, and especially in the Renaissance interpretation of Mary. It is a story from a time when Elizabeth is much younger, though not quite young, a middle-aged woman who has borne two children. She recalls spending an afternoon with Aidan Phillips, a special romantic friend to her mother in old age. At her mother’s request, Elizabeth is sitting for Mr. Phillips that he might paint her, to cheer him up after a throat operation. Unable either to paint or to speak, he puts down his brush and writes out his thoughts, telling Elizabeth that he would have loved to paint her nude. Elizabeth interprets this as an expression of discouragement at having lost his virility, his creativity, so she helps Mr. Phillips awaken his manhood by loosening her wrap, and like Correggio’s Madonna, letting it fall about her to expose her breasts to him. He begins to paint. She calls this breast-offering a blessing, a gift of life in a place “of withering away and dying.”¹¹ The blessing, she writes in her letter to Blanche, “revolved around my breasts . . . around breasts and breast-milk,” and she locates the blessing she exudes both with Correggio’s Mary and the model for Correggio’s painting.¹²

The letter ends the story here, though there is more that Elizabeth does not write, even in this letter she knows she will never send to Blanche. The story picks up in a setting with which her sister is much more intimate than Elizabeth. It is a hospital, to which Mr. Phillips has returned after radiation treatment. He is shriveled, pained, and waiting for death. He writes a message thanking Elizabeth for the day he painted her breasts. Then for the second and final time, Elizabeth removes her clothes and exposes her breasts for him. She is less certain about this blessing, but it is what happens next that she feels she cannot tell Blanche. Unable to awaken his sense of his own virility at a distance, she begins to stroke his penis and ends up taking it in her mouth. How would the Greeks describe such an act? It is too grotesque for eros, she decides, and agape does not fit, either. She settles upon caritas, a word she recognizes as distinctively Christian.

Eros Literal, Literalized, and Anxious

What do these exposed breasts of Mary, Maria, and Elizabeth express? What divine presence is their baring supposed to bear to us? And what does it mean that these verbal and visual depictions of breasts communicate to many a desire besides caritas, that they convey some meaning other than their capacity to nourish the Christ-babe?

The argument of this chapter is that the Christ born of the Virgin Mary summons and negates—without eradicating—a literal desire, which then becomes more than literal. In this negation, literal eros is not replaced but rather opened, deepened to become the divine eros that bears the arriving presence of Christ to us. It bears to us the God who arrives naked into the exigencies and extinctions of human desire.

The human desire in which God arrives is Christ’s, Mary’s, and our own. The objects of that desire are likewise multi-layered. To describe this multi-layered desire and what it means to receive God in the midst of it, I develop a lexicon of desire, for which a few clarifying notes are in order. First, I use desire and eros interchangeably. I take these two terms as bringing into view disparate aspects of a single phenomenon. Both aspects are important: desire because it is the more ordinary term we use for wanting and loving in everyday life, and eros because it suggests that desire is a form of love. I use them interchangeably because I take this love and this wanting to be two faces of the same event.

If desire and eros sound more dissimilar than they are, the opposite is the case for two other terms I use—literal desire and literalized desire. The suffix marks an important distinction in the phrases, for literal identifies a good desire, literalized a perverse one. Literal desire, on the one hand, simply names desire for a material good, like sex, food, or sensual delight. It is a consumptive desire—an appetitive desire for nourishment or pleasure that terminates in its consumption of a good. To call it a good desire is to affirm its importance for the life of a material creature and note its capacity to open up and become a desire that is more than literal. To call it good, then, is not to claim it is virtuous or noble, any more than one might call hunger virtuous or noble. Literal desires like hunger are good because they maintain material life, but their character is undetermined. Literalized desire, on the other hand, is definitively vicious. It carries a negative valence, for it names desire that has been reduced to or equated with its consumptive forms; it is desire that forecloses or attempts to foreclose any non-consumptive meanings. Literalized desire is literal desire that has been disconnected from the non-literal, or from any end other than gratifying the one who desires. It attempts to cut off pleasure and sensory gratification from any higher good.

That pleasure and sensory gratification can be ordered to higher goods implies a further distinction, between literal and non-literal forms of desire. This distinction corresponds to something like the traditional literal and non-literal meanings of Scripture. The non-literal meanings of desire refer, that is, to a spiritual sense, which finds its most robust form in desire from and for the divine—though non-literal desire, too, may go astray, as Chapter 5 explores. And as in the interpretation of Scripture, so with the hermeneutics of desire: much hangs on the configuration of the literal and non-literal senses. Does the non-literal extend and augment the literal? Or displace it?

The Christ-babe of Maria lactans arrives amidst desire that neither reduces to the consumptive nor leaves it behind. Literal eros is not eradicated, and neither is non-literal eros sundered from the literal. The arriving Christ negates, without ever being sanitized of, literal desire. This is what makes Maria lactans a source of anxiety: it figures together the desire for nourishment, pleasure, and the divine. Images of the Christ-babe nursing at Mary’s breast suggest the slipperiness of desire that feeds the anxiety threaded through the string of vignettes I beaded together—an anxiety about communication, about saying and being heard rightly, showing and being rightly seen. It is a worry about exposure and failure and the costs of success. The anxiety is made explicit in the ending of J. M. Coetzee’s short story alluded to earlier, “The Humanities in Africa.” Elizabeth Costello writes a letter she knows she will never send. She writes it, anyway, for the words will not come unless she mentally addresses them to her sister, Blanche.

After she ends the letter, Elizabeth continues the story of the second breast-baring as she speaks to Blanche in her head, but when she arrives at the end of that story, she has blocked Blanche from sharing her remembrance. The memory continues without further audience. At last hitting upon the word caritas to describe her action, Elizabeth knows the word is right by “the swelling in her heart,” even though she realizes that what a nurse or her mother would see if they were to walk into Mr. Phillips’s room right then would bear an “utter, illimitable difference” to that feeling in her heart.¹³ That the difference cannot be overcome by transforming the visual image into a verbal one is implied by Elizabeth’s decision to end her mental address to Blanche. If the difference does not correspond to the difference between visual and non-visual communication, neither does it correspond to the difference between the perception of the event by others and the perception of the event by herself. For Elizabeth worries most, not about what others might make of the event, but what she will make of it when she leaves the hospital, when it is the next day or week or year. “What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character?” she wonders. “Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?”¹⁴

She does not want to fall. Where is someone who can prevent such a fall, who might even mend her heart’s hole? She turns back to the memory-figure of her sister. “Blanche, dear Blanche . . . why is there this bar between us? Why can we not speak to each other straight and bare, as people ought who are on the brink of passing? . . . [O]f the world we grew up in, just you and I left. Sister of my youth, do not die in a foreign field and leave me without an answer!”¹⁵ It is on this desperate plea, this unfulfilled desire to make herself known and so know herself without holes, that the story ends. She has groped for something—expression? recognition?—that she has not found.

Desire, whether we name it eros, caritas, or agape, leads us into versions of ourselves we do not know and are perhaps afraid to know. In the desire she expresses and inspires, Elizabeth Costello finds a vulnerability that renders this desire still more precarious: our selves are known through others who might misunderstand (or too fully understand) what we are expressing. Perhaps it is better to silence those desires and live with our opacity. Elizabeth never sends the letter, nor does she finish it. Rather than risk the exposure of her desires, she chooses death in a foreign field without an answer.

Elizabeth performs a certain kind of iconoclastic response—one that attempts to curtail the contingencies involved in expressing desire by truncating the expressions themselves. She enacts an iconoclasm of temptation, a fear-governed attempt to suspend the presences an image might loose into the world.¹⁶ The slipperiness of desire generates in her an anxiety similar to the Tridentine and the Protestant worries about images that excite lust and cultivate desire for shameful activities. In the end, Elizabeth suppresses her memory-image and stifles even her desire to know her own desire. She eliminates the possibility of exposing her shame by eliminating the expression ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Our Life with Images
• 1. Born of the Virgin Mary: Arriving Presence
• 2. Came Down from Heaven and Was Made Human: Abiding Presence
• 3. Crucified, Died, and Was Buried: Riven and Riving Presence
• 4. Rose Again on the Third Day: Abiding Presence
• 5. Will Come Again in Glory: Arriving Presence
• Conclusion: The Image of the Invisible God
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Series List