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Hello, I am new here and mean not to sound to ignorant but something puzzles me. As I watch images broadcast of the Sistine Chapel I notice the painting by Michelangelo of God making man. Isn't any image of God the father a sin, no matter who made it or where it is located? Just puzzled that if it is a representation of God, then wouldn't that just be a huge heresy right over the alter? Please set me straight and ease my mind! Christos Voskrese!

Of course that is work in a Latin Church which makes a difference. But I believe the Council stated becasue we have seen Christ, we have seen God, thereby allowing icons to be written. God as the Father is not seen in icons, he is ususally represented by the hand showing as from a son type of image and maybe something else. I am sure you will get a better answer though, just wait.

Thank you Pani. But Jesus didn't live past his 33rd year so how could we have seen him old as God is in the painting. God is ageless so he can't be represented, especially as an old man. I believe Latin rite, Byzantine rite, any Catholic rite, the Orthodox, the Jews, and Islam believe it is a sin to paint an image of God.

Not quite. The icon of the "Ancient of Days" is biblically inspired but does not necessarily represent God the Father. Moreover, the fresco in the Sistine Chapel is not an icon in the liturgical/theological sense; few people go to the Sistine Chapel to venerate the frescoes, though they may well find the frescoes inspirational.

If I sound a tad negative about the Sistine Chapel, please tolerate me - I'm still recovering from the overly-talkative commentator at the Holy Father's Mass yesterday who would not stop babbling about the art work, the cars in the street (I'm not making that up!) and other irrelevancies instead of allowing us to listen to the Mass. I finally turned off the sound, which reduced my stress level.

Incognitus

"In the icon it is not the facial features that count (though icons essentially adhere to the appearance of the acheiropoietos) No, what matters is the new kind of seeing. The icon is supposed to originate from an opening up of the inner senses, from a faciliation of sight that gets beyond the surface of the empirical and percieves Christ, as the later theology of icons puts it, in the light of Tabor. It thus leads the man who contemplates it to the point where, through the interior vision that the icon embodies, he beholds in the sensible that which, though above the sensible, has entered into the sphere of the senses. As Evdokimov says so beautifully, the icon requires a "fast from the eyes". Icon painters, he says, must learn how to fast with their eyes and prepare themselves by a long path of prayerful asceticism. This is what marks the transition from art to sacred art (p. 188). The icon comes from prayer and leads to prayer. It delivers a man from that closure of the senses which percieves only the externals, the material surface of things, and is blind to the transparency of the spirit, the transparency of the Logos. At the most fundamental level, what we are dealing with here is nothing other than the transcendence of faith. The whole problem of knowledge in the modern world is present. If an interior opening-up does not occur in man that enables him to see more than what can be measured and weighed, to percieve the reflection of divine glory in creation, then God remains excluded from our field of vision. The icon, rightly understood, leads us away from false questions about portraits, portraits comprehensible at the level of the senses, and thus enables us to discern the face of Christ and, in him, of the Father. Thus in the icon we find the same spiritual orientations that we discovered previously when emphasising the eastward direction of the liturgy. The icon is intended to draw us onto an inner path, the eastward path, toward the Christ who is to return. Its dynamism is identical with the dynamism of the liturgy as a whole. Its Christology is trinitarian. It is the Holy Spirit who makes us capable of seeing, he whose work is always to move us towards Christ. "We have drunk deeply of the Spirit," says St Athanasius, "and we drink Christ" (Evdokimov, p.204). This seeing, which teaches us to see Christ, not "according to the flesh", but according to the Spirit (cf. 2 Cor 5:16), grants us also a glimpse of the Father himself"--Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Spirit of the Liturgy.

Hi,

I will not address your question directly. Rather, I'd ask you what makes you think that painting is a representation of God, the Father?

Was not mankind a work of the Holy Trinity?

Are not the Son and the Holy Spirit every bit as Creator as the Father is?

Yes, nobody has seen the Father, but because we have seen the Son, and because the Father and the Son are One, we know exactly what the Father "looks" like.

Shalom,
Memo

I appreciate all the responses but nothing really concrete has been said. The fact is, in the frescoe there is an old man. I would venture to say that the intentions were probably to be God the father. If the intentions were to be a representation of Jesus as an old man then it is a misleading painting. Alot of responses telling about icons, but this is obviously not an icon as it is not venerated. It wasn't written by Michelangelo but rather painted, hence it cannot be an icon. It just seems that this is clearly wrong. The only problem I think Catholicism has is that they put too much stock in "faith and reason" which is good but it is also wrong. Its kinda like telling a lie then trying to justify it. It is clearly wrong. Besides, if those who have seen the Son have seen the father, then has Michelangelo seen the Son? No. Has anyone who ever wrote an icon seen the Son? No. The only people who have seen the Son are gone.

It's art, beautiful art, but not even devotional art. I suspect it was Michaelangelo's attempt to tell a story in pictures. Art often tries to visually represent that which can not be accurately represented. No one in their right mind actually thinks that is a portrait of God the Father.

Dear ByzanTN, you're exactly right, it is just art. So why not hang the Mona Lisa in there also? I bet though if you were to ask most people who the "old guy" was, I wonder what they would say? Is art more important than doctrine? If so, then... "father, forgive them for they know not what they do".

Yes Western Church art normally has a pedagogical stem rather than anything else. Benedict XVI recalls how Evdokimov thinks this change began when Christian Platonism in the West was blended with Christian Aristotelianism in the 13th century.

However, we have all seen the Son. To say we havent is a lie. We see the Son everytime we go to Mass: Body and Blood, Soul and Divnity. Iconography both Greek and Latin is built on the principal of the incarnation, which I'm quite surprised the Byzantine Catholics on this board have not emerged to remind you. For Oriental iconographic theology is far more sophisitcated than the Latin Church's theology on the same subject.

Photius, Dr Roman et al. Where are you??

I quoted Benedict XVI to emphasise this point and I thought you would apprehend his point through reading over it. Its not idolatrous because the form and substance are not believed to be the form and substance of God but point beyond themselves towards God as windows into Heaven. Please read over the Holy Father's words as I re-produced them on this thread and try to understand what our beloved Benedict XVI is saying.

I disagree with what you and Charles have agreed about the Sistine also and evidently do did our late great Pontiff, John Paul II. He wrote his 'Roman Tryptic' meditating on the very images in the Sistine that, it almost sounds like, you are saying detract from the worship of God. Just to take a snippet from what I reproduced from Benedict XVI's work earlier on in this thread:

George Cardinal Pell indeed only spoke yesterday of how he felt when he took the oath to secrecy before the Conclave beneath Michaelangelo's portrait of the last judgement. The power of Michaelangelo's vivid depiction of sinners being cast into Hell, including many Popes and Cardinals, hit home and made him realise in an even more vivid way just how grave his responsibilty was. When art can evoke this kind of response it cannot be anything other than a help to the life of the Church.

An illustration of this is that here at Oxford even the Calvinist Proffessor I had for my lectures on the Christian doctrine of Creation, Alistair McGrath, used the very portrait you are referring to to expoud the ideas of St Athanasius, St Bonaventure, John Calvin and Karl Barth on the incarnation and its implications and affects. Citing how Michaelangelo's depiction of God extending his finger to Adam and enlivening him epitomises the relationality of Creator to creature.

Now if a Calvinist Oxford Proffessor can see this surely you can too Apprentice, no?

Do you think the Holy Spirit actually looks like a bird? Or that St. Michael has wings and feathers?

Think about how many saints, popes, theologians, and others have seen Michaelangelo's work and, well, hundreds of years later it's still there. That should give you long pause before reaching a negative conclusion.

No, you are right, it's not iconography. One could argue, however, that Michaelangelo's talent was a gift from God and used in the service of the Church (and humankind).

I think Christians can separate devotional art from iconography/statues, just like they separate veneration from worship. I'm sure God can too.

Artists, as far as I understand things, don't usually want their work interpreted too literally. They are conveying ideas and emotions, not writing a term paper.

There is more sin in my heart than there is on that ceiling. So if I were standing in that chapel, what do you think would pain God more, my heart or that painting? What about the people who are there every day?

Alters have been made/improvised in gulags, war zones, concentration camps, and the like, so just what context is necessary for an alter to be in? What does that have to do with what's really important, anyway?

If the matter continues to vex you then please try hard to remember that Jesus has a perfect sense of humor.

Thus asked Myles:
"Photius, Dr Roman et al. Where are you??"

I'm fairly busy trying to sundry things finished before Passion Week as I'm needed to keep the cliros in order since those who sing will never figure out the order of the Services.

And, there are 5 other posts I feel I must reply to.

So, ever so tersely:

Many councils in the Orthodox Church have forbidden the portraying of God the Father. And all have been quickly disregarded. Once, in Russia, it was ordered that the eyes of old men portrayed as the Father in icons be plucked, as such portrayals are blasphemous, so the eyes were plucked and the icons burned. And soon again, the Father reappeared. In seminary, many of my classmates contemptuously referred to icons of the Trinity as "Christ with the old man and the bird".

The traditional icon of the Trinity is "the Hospitality of Abraham", depicting three Angels. Presumably, one of those Angels is the Father, although I've heard it explained that Abraham and Sarah were visited by the Word accompanied by two real angels representing the other two Persons of the Trinity; I find that absurd.

The basis for all this is that "No one has seen the Father" and "It is not possible for man to see God". However, the voice of the Father was heard at the Baptism of Christ, and the Uncreated Light than bodily man cannot endure is depicted in icons of the Transfiguration.

As a youth, I admired the zeal of whoever it was who order the eyes be plucked from icons attempting to depict the Father. But now that I am a man, I have put away the things of a child, and while I still look askance upon depicting the Father as an Old Man, I venerate such icons when I am in their presence.

Photius

I forgot you're still in the middle of Lent, I apologise Photius, thanks for taking the time out to give a nice little Orthodox answer. Oriental iconography has such a rich theology behind it that more people would give their opinions of this subject.

By the way, when you say the Fathers' eyes reappeared do you mean they were rewritten or that it was miraculous?

Yes I felt this way when I first reverted to Catholicism but I've come to trust the Church so much that gradually my animosity towards images of the Trinity have faded. Indeed, I never realised this until this thread began...The pedagogical purpose of such sacred art and the thoughts for contemplation evoked by religious imagery so envelop my mind that I dont have time to fear. What is conveyed by the art about the Lord our God is so much more powerful than anything else that it leaves no space for thinking about iconoclasm.

Myles and Photius, thank you for your thought provoking explainations. This is what I was looking for. However, ByzanTN, of course I don't think the Holy Spirit looks like a dove. The Holy Spirit and The Father are bodiless! Well they have the body of Jesus. I am glad to see that there are a few bright lights among all the darkness. I take my leave.