December 16th, 2024
The Shroud of Turin.
Visualizing God Incarnate
“You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live,” reads Exodus 33:20. Thus God in the Old Testament describes His unfathomable majesty and might. And it is true—never in the Old Testament do we see God’s face. He appears as a column of fire, a voice in a burning bush, a whisper in the wind, but He is impossible to capture, fathom, or depict.
Until the Incarnation.
After the Incarnation, God became accessible to us in human form, a human form that Mary could embrace and Joseph could shelter and we could crucify. With the Incarnation—“incarnate” literally meaning “embodied in flesh”—God became physical to us. Mankind could touch Him. Mankind could see Him.
And—importantly for us visual artists—mankind could paint Him.
Yes, the supreme God who created creation, the awesome incorporeal Being whom the ancient priests barely dared to imagine, took on human flesh in such a way that the paints and brushes and tools of that creation could now depict His likeness. And they did; we are blessed with the miraculous relics of Veronica’s veil and the Shroud of Turin that bear the face of Christ.
Appreciate the gravitas of this: we have images, likenesses, of God Himself. We can paint and draw God’s face. We can meditate on what God looked like when He became man, what His perfectly beautiful and sinless mother looked like, what His foster father and friends and grandparents and cousins would have looked like. We can envision what the shepherds and kings would have seen when they entered that stable on a cold winter’s night.
And throughout the centuries since then, artists have leapt at the invitation. Tradition holds that St. Luke painted Mary from life in the days of the early Church, and that was just the start. Jesus is the most painted man in all of history; Mary is the most painted woman. The miracle of God being born to a sinless woman is a subject matter that has been represented in every style of art, every culture, every skill level, from Europe to Asia to Africa, from the Old Masters to preschoolers with their crayons. We celebrate the fact that God took on humanity, that while He walked this earth He had a face, that He looked like someone—looked like us.
As artists, we participate in forming the canon of Tradition by seeking truth through artistic mediums. Pope Benedict XVI put art on the same level as the lives of the saints when describing its importance to the Church, saying that “art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith.” Sacred art, poetry, and music are part of sacred tradition just as much as philosophy and theology. We seek truth by visualizing the same subjects in the countless different styles of cultures and historical eras, contributing to the moral imagination by expanding our understanding of God and holiness. Think of how many different “Madonna and Child” paintings you have seen; the subject is the same, but haven’t they all still managed to move you in different ways? When we create art, we are providing the faithful with an opportunity for meditation and a way to encounter the truth not through words but through beauty, thus enhancing the moral imagination of these mysteries.
It's a serious undertaking, to make God beautiful in the eyes of others. Some attempts succeed more than others, and even our most beautiful work can never truly come close to capturing the full splendor of God. Some may despair at that; some may be tempted to reject visual art out of fear that its imperfection may detract from His majesty. But when the Church rejected the iconoclasm heresy, it sanctioned the mission of artists to pursue truth through beauty, however imperfectly, in order to further understand Him. As long as truth is the mission at the heart of our work, we need not be afraid if our attempts fall short; words and paintings may never fully describe God, but they inspire the soul to seek Him and understand Him, and that is worthy work.
“Joy to the world,” so the Christmas carol goes, for “the Lord is come; let men their songs employ.” Let men their songs employ—let men, in other words, use their art in all its forms to glorify the truth of the incarnate God. The Holy Spirit will work through you just as He did the authors of the Gospels to reveal truth through beauty. We have been given a holy mission with our talents; approach it with humility and let God speak through your art to achieve His glory.
Rebekah Balick works part-time as an artist and writer in addition to her primary work in international business. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia and is always grateful for a chance to write for CAC.