In the 1559 Latin edition of his monumental Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin excoriated humanity’s inclination to substitute its conceptions of deity for the true God. Human ingenuity, he said, was a “perpetual forge of idols” (idolorum fabricam).1 The phrase recalls the biblical tradition of denouncing the production of idols from wood and metal. Whatever else one may think of it, Calvin’s critique of the imagination or the visual operation of cognition surely gets one thing right: human beings manufacture their worlds with the images they craft. Even if they are not worshipped, images exert powerful effects over those who use them. We believe them, cherish them, hoard them, exchange them, remember by means of them, and use them to protect ourselves, to glorify ourselves, to recreate ourselves. Imagination is how we put images to work inside and outside our minds in order to accomplish all these things.
I have called this book The Forge of Vision not because I wish to endorse Calvin’s views on idolatry, but because I like very much that he recognizes the cultural work seeing performs, even if he regards it in a very negative light. Moreover, the phrase acknowledges that vision is a cultural operation. The forge of vision is the cultural formation of seeing at any number of levels. Human beings are in the business of fashioning imagery that acts as their understanding of the world. Modernity has facilitated this brain function with conceptual innovations and a steady stream of new techniques in science, technology, education, commerce, art—and in religion. Each of these areas of modern culture has generated images, visual practices, and image-making devices that serve as instruments for shaping imagination and grasping the world around us.
Yet perhaps because of the power and scope of such visual technologies, seeing has come under considerable suspicion in the modern era, much of it charged with an antagonism comparable to Calvin’s epistemological critique. Vision is often conceived as a distant, disembodied sense, and vision as contemplation or philosophical reflection in particular has been criticized as taking the shape of a remote and magisterial gaze that reduces everything it sees to its object.2 At first glance, seeing might appear a spectral, immaterial event, consisting of nothing more than light and thought. But for those who attend to vision as a social, embodied, material range of practices, vision is forged from objects and places, bodies and desire, ruler and compass, frescoed walls and engraved pages. To see is to enter into a host of relationships that stretch across time and space. In this regard, seeing is not different from any of the other senses. Sensation in all its forms is a robust engagement of the body with the world around it. Thomas Hobbes put the matter very succinctly at the outset of his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), where he defined sensation in aptly physical terms: “The cause of sense is the external body, or object, which presseth the organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in the taste and touch, or mediately, as in seeing, hearing, and smelling; which pressure, by the mediation of nerves and other strings and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the brain and heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavor of the heart to deliver itself; which endeavor, because outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this seeming, or fancy, is that which men call sense.”3 With this and other such mechanical explanations of human interiority, modernity took shape and the forge of vision began to emerge as an engine of cultural construction.
But fancy continued to bear the stigma of deception and the marginal status of contrivance as the faculty of seeming. The tradition of Enlightenment thought came to recognize the power of imagination for its constructive activity in conception, but also expressed wariness regarding its results. In setting out his guidelines for the proper interpretation of nature in 1620, Francis Bacon warned readers of the “specious meditations, speculations, and theories of mankind” that skewed genuine understanding.4 Human conception should submit itself, Bacon contended, to the great subtlety of nature rather than to the mind’s predisposition for useless abstractions and axiomatic thinking, which is unreliable because it begins with received doctrines. Moreover, human understanding “admits a tincture of the will and passions, which generate their own system accordingly; for man always believes more readily that which he prefers.”5 Experimental method was the indispensable means for avoiding this error. “There is no small difference between the idols of the human mind, and the ideas of the divine mind; that is to say, between certain idle dogmas, and the real stamp and impression of created objects, as they are found in nature.”6 The best way to read the mind of God was to adhere to the physical evidence of nature.
Bacon’s empiricism exerted enormous influence. When it came to the imagination’s influence on religious sentiment, David Hume could portray the imagination as bearing responsibility for human self-deception. In his Natural History of Religion (1757), Hume explained the origin of religion as a kind of inexorable epistemological mistake. Unable to resolve by abstraction the “unknown causes” behind natural events, human beings objectify their fears and anxieties, and rely fundamentally upon imagination to do so: “By degrees, the active imagination of men, uneasy in this abstract conception of objects, about which it is incessantly employed, begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like mankind; actuated by love and hatred, and flexible by gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices. Hence the origin of religion: And hence the origin of idolatry or polytheism.”7 For all of his free-thinking, Hume continued to entertain a view of human nature that was remarkably similar to Calvin’s: “The feeble apprehensions of men cannot be satisfied with conceiving their deity as a pure spirit and perfect intelligence.”8 To Hume, the mind was a forge of idols, and that was, simply put, the origin of religion: the production of false images of God. Both concluded that the only way to discipline this unruly human nature was to submit it to texts—the Bible for Calvin, and history and philosophy for Hume: “The frail memories of men, their love of exaggeration, their supine carelessness; these principles, if not corrected by books and writing, soon pervert the account of historical events, where argument or reasoning has little or no place, nor can ever recall the truth, which has once escaped those narrations.”9 Clearly, Protestantism and the European Enlightenment shared some very deep understandings about human nature, reason, and the power of print.
But there were countervailing views of imagination with roots in classical antiquity. Aristotle had contended in De Anima that “when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image.”10 Luther echoed this view in his argument with those who stormed churches in the 1520s to remove or destroy imagery: “It is impossible for me to hear and bear in mind [the Passion of Christ] without forming mental images of it in my heart.”11 Renaissance Hermetic thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and, later, Giordano Bruno celebrated other ancient sources of thought on image, memory, and imagination. Influenced by ancient works attributed to Hermes Trismagistus, Ficino and Bruno among many others believed that archetypal images were the privileged medium for organizing memory to reflect the structure of the universe. Frances Yates has characterized Hermeticism’s project of imagistic reflection as “organized through the art of memory into a magico-religious technique for grasping and unifying the world of appearances through arrangements of significant images.”12 The Neoplatonic tradition in late antiquity also argued against the empiricist notion that imagination is limited to what it gathers from sensation, insisting that the mind knows certain things innately, such as the laws of numbers and geometrical forms. This view was endorsed for the Christian tradition by an authority no less than Augustine.13 It allowed Augustine to affirm the view that Plotinus had taken earlier, correcting Plato’s dismissal of the art of painting as lowly and imitative. “For the beautiful objects designed by artists’ souls and realized by skilled hands,” Augustine wrote, “come from that beauty which is higher than souls.”14
In the eighteenth century, Neoplatonism also informed the writings of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who took quite a different view than Hume regarding the relationship of religion and imagination. For him, God was an artist who impressed ideas on matter. Like Plotinus, Shaftesbury interpreted Plato against himself, contending that artists do much more than superficially copy: they conceive and understand what they create because their creative activity, like God’s creation of the cosmos, draws on the principles that inform material things. Aesthetic taste and judgment were therefore central to Shaftesbury’s philosophy. In particular, the sublime was the felt revelation of the infinite. In 1714, Shaftesbury wrote a rhapsodic account of his mystical experience of the sublimity of nature, a Neoplatonic paean to divinity, which discloses itself to the imagination even as this faculty fails to encompass the grandeur of divine creative power:
O glorious nature! supremely fair, and sovereignly good! All-loving and all-lovely, all-divine! [. . .] O mighty nature! Wise substitute of providence! Impowered creatress! O thou impowering divinity, supreme creator! Thee I invoke, and thee alone adore. To thee this solitude, this place, these rural meditations are sacred [. . .] Thy being is boundless, unsearchable, impenetrable. In thy immensity all thought is lost; fancy gives over its flight: and wearied imagination spends itself in vain; finding no coast nor limit of this ocean, nor, in the widest tract through which it soars, one point yet nearer the circumference than the first center whence it parted. Thus having oft essayed, thus sallied forth into the wide expanse, when I return again within myself, struck with the sense of this so narrow being, of the fullness of that immense one; I dare no more behold the amazing depths, nor sound the abyss of Deity.15
It was the aesthetic of the sublime that boosted the place of imagination in European philosophical and artistic thought in the course of the eighteenth century, leading to the heady spirituality of Romanticism. The sublime was a critical development in modern aesthetics because it became a way of understanding how the arts, creativity, and imagination shaped the human subject. Since antiquity, beauty had been considered a moral agent influencing character and improving behavior. The sublime appealed because it modulated and gave language to power in the immediate formation of the moral and spiritual self. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the ascent of the sublime, gendered male and hailed as dramatic, uplifting, and spiritually irresistible. Kant regarded the sublime as the version of the beautiful that transcended reason in its operation in the imagination. The sublime was the aesthetic lens under which the malleability of the soul became most evident and the modern subject emerged, formed by taste and refined feeling as much as by reason. Taking its place within what Michel Foucault outlined as “the genealogy of the modern subject,” the aesthetic sensibility of the sublime represented a significant development of the modern subject taking shape in and generating the imagined communities of sentiment, race, gender, religion, and nationhood.16 This is not an operation of domination in which human selves are stamped by an industrial process over which they have no control. The allure of the sublime was precisely the self-culture it promised. The power of imagination was something that the modern citizen-subject could engage for himself (and the modern citizen-subject was normatively a “him”). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the forge of vision called the sublime was the self-crafting vision of the modern (male) subject.
As a way of stoking the coals of imagination, the sublime was an aesthetic that took many forms in artistic practice. A distinctive version of it is found in an early nineteenth century poem-painting by the visionary poet and artist William Blake. A detail from it appears on the cover of this book (see plate 7 for its original setting on the page). Blake’s forge is virtually the opposite of Calvin’s, yet both hammer out fundamentally modern conceptions of the human being. In Blake’s poem and image, the character of Los is accosted by Spectre, the power of reason, one of four aspects of human nature—reason, imagination/emotion, desire, and the personality—that came asunder in their fall from primordial unity in the figure of Albion, dissolving when Albion fell asleep. Dedicated to recovering the lost union, Los acts as the power of inspiration, which is affixed to imagination and emotion. Reason, grown cold from the fall, is the driving force behind thought without passion, Blake’s diagnosis of religious dogma and orthodoxy. One might say that Spectre is among the “mind-forg’d manacles” that Blake laments in Songs of Experience (see “London”) as one of the forces concocted by humans that oppress humankind.
The rivalry of reason and imagination is rooted in the cultural history of modernity. Each faculty has been hailed at various times as the basis for freedom from external authority. The more liberty was associated with individual freedom and privacy, the more subjectivity was hailed as the basis of the person, the more imagination was celebrated as its proper domain and instrumentation. For Calvin, the mind was a forge of self-deception; reading scripture and thinking clearly about its revealed truths was the proper task of Christians. Blake’s image, on the other hand, is a characteristically modern and very Romantic conception of the imagination, an engine or faculty long regarded by Protestantism as suspect, as Calvin’s characterization of the mental forge indicates. But Blake was a fervent artist and seer for whom the creative faculty of imagination was the medium of revelation. For many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, imagination had become a faculty of cognition, one of the mind’s sovereign capacities for making sense of the world in terms that could not be reduced to those of reason.
The idea of the imagination as an internal faculty that processes sensation was of course ancient. But in the modern era debates over its scope and reliability, its visual characteristics, and its relation to ideas and words came to occupy increasing attention with regard to the nature of art, cognition, and religious experience, particularly as each of these related to the vexing problem of religious authority in an age when its traditional forms were rapidly changing. But the present book is not a history of ideas, but rather a cultural history of the visuality of Christian thought and practice since the sixteenth century. Its argument is that this history of visuality contributed importantly to the shape of modernity, which included both dispositions regarding imagination—as trustworthy and reliable and as deceptive or misleading.
I do not wish to celebrate modernity, but to understand its cultural and historical formation, especially with regard to visuality. This is not because I consider that seeing eclipses the other senses, or that visual culture triumphs over all other forms of thought and feeling, or that modern culture is quintessentially visual. Indeed, all of these arguments exemplify an exceptionalism that I find unpersuasive because it misses how deeply imbricated seeing is in the body and the entire sensorium. The forge of vision consists of more than an eyeball. It is the entire body and it is the social bodies to which any individual body belongs. In fact, this is why seeing should be taken seriously: if we study modern imagery and practices of imagination, we will be studying modern embodiment. Seeing is one important avenue to the fully embodied character of religions, even or especially those, like Protestantism, that are fond of insisting that they do not indulge imagery. And the modern forge of vision differs in characteristic ways from that of premodern eras, and therefore has something to say about modernity itself. We might easily perform the same examination of the history of hearing or touching. But seeing attracts my attention because it yields material artifacts—images and visual devices of one kind or another—that have engaged Catholics and Protestants over the centuries. Moreover, images and their uses have served as occasions for sharp debate, competition, and violence as well as devotional, liturgical, and even mystical experience.
Modernity can be measured in many ways as a period of time when a number of conditions and assumptions prevailed as given truths among a dominant culture, in this case, Western European society and eventually its far-flung colonial projects and their post-colonial legacies. The approach that this book takes understands the following developments as the primary organizing effects of Euro-North American modernity: the broad relevance of the printing press for the production and dissemination of information; the consequent rise of literacy; the great expansion of middle classes; the attendant claim for an individual’s right to read and believe according to the dictates of conscience; the gradual separation or buffering of church and state from one another; the cultivation of subjectivity as the domain of belief and individual identity, as conducted by the faculty of imagination and understood as the sovereign domain of individual liberty; and the facilitation of all of the above by the fluid medium of exchange of capitalism and the monetary markets that drove national development and colonial expansion. Moreover, I wish to argue that image and imagination contributed importantly to the modern history of Christianity by shaping practices of devotion, prayer, reading, evangelization, conceptions of nationhood, likenesses of Jesus, and the circulation of images and objects as ways of structuring relationships among humans and with the divine. Imagination was not invented in the modern age of Western Europe, but it certainly rose to command new attention as a powerful faculty of human thought and feeling. And images of many kinds played a powerful role in stimulating imagination and putting it to work.
All of these aspects of Western modernity are implicated in the development over several centuries of broad changes in social relations. Individual, nation, commonwealth, and church all changed as the matrices of authority, as the media of modern identity. Who one was and how one’s identity was constructed underwent considerable transformation. For modern religion to assume the legal as well as epistemological structure of “belief,” it was necessary for it to be located within the head, that is, to be personalized and situated in the domain of private thought and sentiment. In fact, of course, religion was always more than that. Even as private sentiment, it was inextricably attached to the body hosting the sentiment. And images and acts of imagination were always more than cognitive modes of assent. Opinion shaped imagination powerfully by disciplining the body. Public punishment—burning, hanging, dunking, imprisoning, torturing—was itself a way of molding the body politic toward the public observance of particular confessions or rites. Print culture emerged as an even more powerful instrument for doing so, and adopted rhetoric and imagery as means of moving audiences toward the affirmation of certain views.
The target in print culture was the imagination—the faculty of thinking, feeling, and remembering in mental images and other sensory traces. Imagination allowed people to make themselves from within as well as to participate with groups who collectively imagined the world and the self. Visualization played a key role. The imagination is a remarkable medium for meditative practice in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1548), which was quickly extended from clerical to lay use and resulted in intricately illustrated guides to prayer. That most modern of Protestant books, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), envisioned the Christian life as a long pilgrimage divided into a series of critical junctures that illustrators limned for countless editions of the book. Introspection, discernment, determination became the instruments of spiritual journeying not only for the spiritual elite of European society, as they had been for the cloistered before the modern era, but for everyone. Bunyan’s book was the most owned and widely read book after the Bible in colonial North America. And the Jesuits took the Spiritual Exercises around the world with them, deploying its practice in retreats for religious and lay alike. In no small way, Catholics and Protestants helped teach the modern world how to imagine, how to read, and how to consume print.
Part I of this book sketches historical accounts of the imagery and visual practices of each tradition, beginning in the sixteenth century. I then scrutinize, in part II, the role of images and imagination in sacred economies, the iconicity of words, the imagined community of Christian nationhood, the imagined likeness of Jesus, and the legacy of Christian visuality in the history of modern art. My contention is that external and internal seeing, vision and visual cognition, have shaped the modern history of Western Christianity in characteristic ways such that any account of the religion in either or both of its principal traditions must take into consideration the substance and effects of imaging and visual practice.
Although my treatment is not limited to the geography of Europe and North America, I focus on the careers of the two major strands of modern Western Christianity—Catholicism and Protestantism. I have kept the two together since they present a history of interacting with and mirroring one another in striking ways as they moved out from Europe to other parts of the world. The practice of separating Catholicism and Protestantism draws largely from the enmity they bore one another at the outset of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing centuries of violent conflict that plagued Europe. Even long after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought an end to a protracted period of warfare, Protestants and Catholics maintained strong animosity. Although the two appear to have reconciled much of their antagonism in places such as North America and Western Europe during the twentieth century, the present competition between Catholicism and Pentecostalism in parts of South America shows that the two may still engage in rivalry.
As preeminent symbols of that enduring conflict, images have marked the intersection of debate and occasionally violence between the two parties. Ironically, when viewed from the vantage of dispassionate scholarship in the early twenty-first century, the imagery and visual practices of Catholicism and Protestantism can also be seen to bear family features; in some cases, they appear virtually identical. That should not be surprising, as Protestants have always borrowed from the iconographical stock of the Catholic visual tradition, and Catholics came to return the favor. Even while the two fought propaganda wars with imagery, their strategies and visual languages were widely shared. And their practices of devotion, instruction, memorization, commemoration, veneration, and communication are far more similar than the two traditions may have wished, at times, to acknowledge.
Still, there are striking differences between the two traditions, and I want to scrutinize these no less than their similarities. In the opening chapters, attention falls on how each tradition conceives and practices the mediation of the divine. It is not as if Catholics deal only in images and Protestants only in words. Both traditions have made abundant use of each medium. Indeed, I want to show that we cannot properly sever visual and verbal, picture and script from one another since they are intimately interwoven, though differently in each case and over time within each tradition. In the chapters that comprise the second part, I wish to argue that imaging pertains to several fundamental features of modern Christianity: to its practices of exchange that parse the sacred, to the Protestant use of words, to the imagination of nationhood, to the evocation of Jesus’s personal likeness, and even to modern art, whose relation to Christianity is ambivalent. All of these are visual ingredients in—and go far to characterize—the modern experience of Christianity.
I will show how images are part of economies or systems of exchange that characterize (however differently) each version of both traditions at various moments in their histories. As media of exchange among the divine and the human but also among humans themselves, images communicate intention, doctrine, ideological loyalty, contrition, longing, adoration, honor, and pleas for aid. Images are not simply representations of ideas or material correspondents of discourse. They communicate between devotees and saints, the church and the believer, the believer and other believers, the believer and the nonbeliever.
But communication, it will become clear, is more than message-delivery. It is closer to what we might mean by the word enactment. Images are forms of mediation, filling the spaces between bodies, places, things, saints, dreams, and nations. Images are the material, moral, and imaginative technologies without which these sometimes very abstract or immaterial realities would remain quite unreal. By mediating the relations that characterize a religion, images imagine the other, whether it is the devil, an infidel, a convert, a community or nation, or a deity. Among both Catholics and Protestants, images as forms of exchange and relatedness reach over the span separating individuals, to build what no individual can construct alone. Images deliver information, they touch and move, they intuit what cannot be seen, and they imagine communities and connections that complete the individual by securing his or her relation to a larger reality—Jesus, church, millennium, nation.
The history that I will examine from the sixteenth century to the present reveals how uses of images and practices of imagination mediated the relations that comprised the worlds of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, in Europe, North America, and far beyond. These worlds were strongly distinguished from one another by virtue of religion, race, language, and history. Quite often images formed fault lines for competition and conflict between Catholics and Protestants, between missionaries and indigenous peoples. Thus, by refusing to venerate images, Protestants drew the charge from Catholics of denying honor to church tradition and to the saints, God’s appointed assistants to believers. Protestants, in turn, rejected images as idols, as an affront to divine majesty. And both Catholic and Protestant missionaries urged those they proselytized in non-Christian settings to abandon the images of their religions as idols and the tools of demons.
Yet both versions of Christianity made use of images. Some Protestants were (and remain) fond of denying the fact, but images and visuality permeate Protestant thought, imagination, and practice. Protestants and Catholics have each made a point of overdetermining the role of images and their regulation precisely because these have been the features used to distinguish one tradition from the other in a long series of culture wars. The result has been partially distinct, but never completely separate, imaginaries. In fact, in many ways, the sharp distinctions have blurred in the last century or so. But there remains a history in which images functioned differently in each tradition as media of exchange and as means of imagination.
As Protestants have long told their story, the Reformation reintroduced the primacy of the Word of God by rediscovering the authority of scripture and applying it as the sole authority in matters of faith. This was often taken to mean that Protestantism based itself on the true revelation of the divine in the words recorded in the Bible. Holy Writ was reliable and authoritative; images, liturgical and devotional paraphernalia, costume, ceremony, and ritualistic words were not. The hoc est corpum meum of the Latin mass was parodied as “hocus pocus,” deceptive magic with no real spiritual authority, only the power to dupe the superstitious flock fooled by priestcraft.17 The utterance of scripture by devout Protestants, on the other hand, was and remains charged with the power of the Holy Spirit to act. Scriptural words are speech-acts among many Protestants, and the Bible is a mechanical device for divination among those who select verses from it randomly as a way of discerning God’s will for them. The Bible is a kind of material icon, an aperture through which God makes himself known and devotees petition their deity for all manner of aid. In view of how the Bible and its uses have been asserted by Protestants from the sixteenth century to the present, a leading interest of this study is the materiality of both images and words.
It is important to point out that I have in several chapters discussed the visual career of Christianity beyond the West, though often only enough to remind myself and the reader that this religion has moved far past its points of origin and traditional dominance. The study of Christianity in the South and East is well underway today and I hope my account provides the reader with numerous points of connection and interaction. But my discussions of Chinese, African, Indian, and Oceanic settings only scratch the surface. The history of Christianity is not a hermetically sealed narrative of internal development. I hope to show how dynamic this history is, even as it operates in remarkably conservative ways to preserve traditional arrangements of authority.