442 - The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Symbol from Genesis to the Twentieth Century

The Art of God Incarnate:
Theology and Symbol from Genesis
to the Twentieth Century
By Aiden NIicholas, O.P.
New York, Paulist, 1980. 180 pp. $7.95.

A superb teacher writes here for all those who marvel at how a religion, building from the image (in humanity, in Adam, in Christ), and building on the glorious artistry of its scriptural sources, could so early and so consistently have ignored the aesthetic mode in the appreciation and explication of its claim. With modest but very stylish flourishes of useful erudition, he sorts out the record.

There is a line of arts-sensitivity that roots in our Judaistic soil (neither as aesthetically arid nor abstract as we have been taught) and runs through our whole history. Concentration in this volume is on development of that line, too long overlaid, in the early church. But the issues and the possibilities that were developed in, say, the iconoclasm controversies, are projected suggestively to our own day-at which point they impinge directly on twentieth-century art attitudes, especially the phenomenological aesthetic (splendidly summarized here), reviving or generating promising leads from the arts side in theological, ethical, and devotional reconstruction.

Such reminders and suggestions couldn't come at a better time. With some philosophic interpretations still winding up in linguistic quarrels which would limit God's action to our language capabilities, and too many ethical/ political interpretations indistinguishable from the papery products of a young social science department

443 - The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Symbol from Genesis to the Twentieth Century

in a smallish college, and common homiletical interpretations tending toward the electronic vulgarities, and the pushiest interpretations of devotion and piety playing around with therapeutic mysticisms and jabber-wocky raptures- with so many traditional veins so obviously worked out, why not try the aesthetic option? It is just ancient enough, untouched enough, and promising enough to turn out to be our Mother Lode.

Theodore A. Gill
John Jay College
N.Y., N.Y.