Sept. 2, 2010

Q: “Arguing against those who subordinated scripture to the effervescent and antinomian dictates of the holy spirit, Calvin insisted on the complete and binding agreement of spirit and scripture. The spirit, he contended, ‘would have us recognize him in his own image, which he has stamped upon the scriptures. He is the Author of the Scriptures: he cannot vary and differ from himself.” ...Is holy writ really free of the cultural interests of its plethora of individual authors and redactors?”

Morgan, David. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005.

C: Morgan uses this quote from Calvin to show that art has gone almost unnoticed as a means of expressing religious culture due to anti-iconism of Protestants like Calvin. Calvin expresses concerns that one cannot express God/Jesus beyond the teachings offered: that anything else simply creates a false idea that can never sync with the reality of what that spirit is. Morgan claims that this view is archaic, considering that the Bible itself has been changed, edited, translated, added to, and deleted from so many times that it is on level with the picture.

However, Morgan is thinking from a strictly anthropological point of view: he does not care about the religion itself, but how we relate to it. If we look at religion and art in this fashion then yes, Morgan has a point. But if we are to look at religion as something done by practitioners—something to be believed and followed—then what we really see is that perhaps Calvin makes a valid point. A painting of a religious figure or scene is entirely dependent on the imagination of the individual who reads the texts. Thus, when we look at this painting, what we are seeing is not even a copy of a copy, but an interpretation of a copy, which brings us farther from the original text. If we want to see how people interpret religion, then Morgan is correct; if we want to understand the religion itself, as Calvin is saying, then we cannot rely solely on art. Calvin’s quote is essentially being used in the wrong context.