The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (review) (original) (raw)

Syllabus: "Incomprehensible Certainty: Theological Aesthetics of the Image"

In this seminar, we will explore the role of images in theology, phenomenology, and aestheticsboth ancient and modern. Our guiding hypothesis will be that the power and efficacy of images is closely bound up with their distinctive ontology -one that cannot be effectively assimilated to propositional, mimetic, or otherwise referential models of cognition. While the rise of modern epistemologies and, concurrently, of modern aesthetics has tended to construe the image as a subsidiary version of "representation" (Vorstellung), Platonic, Patristic, and Byzantine accounts of the eikon tend to characterize images, and the phenomenology of their experience, in far more supple and richer language. Here the apprehension of the image qua icon is not animated by a protocol of affective detachment and objective cross-referencing but, instead, by its transformative impact on the beholder and the formation of a liturgical and ethical community. What accounts for the icon's distinctive efficacy are several factors: 1) a formal element, such as the return of "inverse [or "reverse"] perspective" in early-20 th century Eastern Orthodox icon theory, yet also realized in post-impressionist (Western) modernist art; 2) the situational dynamic of the image, such as its embedding in, or alluding to, ambient liturgical frameworks and purposes; and 3) the image's materiality, such as the modernist image's reaffirmation of color as a principal means for unveiling (and entangling the beholder in) perceptible qualities that not only fall outside the scope of propositional knowledge but, in their incontrovertible reality and presence, exhort us to recover an ontology anterior to modern procedural rationality.

Christianity's Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, Its Theoretical and Theological Appeal

The development of medieval Christian thought reveals from its inception in foundational authors like Augustine and Boethius an inherent engagement with Neoplatonism. To their influence that of Pseudo-Dionysius was soon added, as the first speculative medieval author, the Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena (810–877 CE), used all three seminal authors in his magisterial demonstration of the workings of procession and return. Rather than a stable ongoing trajectory, however, the development of medieval Christian (Neo)Platonism saw moments of flourishing alternate with moments of philosophical stagnation. The revival of the Timaeus and Platonic cosmogony in the twelfth century marks the achievement of the so-called Chartrian authors, even as the Timaeus never acquired the authority of the biblical book of Genesis. Despite the dominance of scholastic and Aristotelian discourse in the thirteenth century, (Neo) Platonism continued to play an enduring role. The Franciscan Bonaventure follows the Victorine tradition in combining Augustinian and Dionysian themes, but Platonic influence underlies the pattern of procession and return — reflective of the Christian arc of creation and salvation — that frames the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Echoing the interrelation of macro-and microcosmos, the major themes of medieval Christian Platonic thought are, on the one hand, cosmos and creation and, on the other, soul and self. The Dominican friar Meister Eckhart and the beguine Marguerite Porete, finally, both Platonically inspired late-medieval Christian authors keen on accomplishing the return, whether the aim is to bring out its deep, abyss-like " ground " (Eckhart) or to give up reason altogether and surrender to the free state of " living without a why " (Marguerite), reveal the intellectual audacity involved in upending traditional theological modes of discourse.

Platonismus und Christentum: Ihre Beziehungen und deren Grenzen

Laval théologique et philosophique (LTP), 2025

This volume is the result of a colloquium held on May 6, 2022, which took place in honor of Professor Barbara Aland † on the occasion of her 85th birthday in the Schloss der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster.