ICONS AND THE AWFUL ANGEL: Just finished Frederica Mathewes-Green’s soon-to-be-released new book about icons. I’m reviewing it, so I won’t tell you too much about it here (gotta keep some things up my sleeve); but the review will be short and so there are some bits I won’t be able to comment on. The book is generally good, but I do want to take issue with one aspect of it: Mathewes-Green champions icons over all other forms of religious art, and does so in a way that I find overstated.

Mathewes-Green writes about how glorious icons are, how they are windows to Heaven. All this is true–and her well-chosen illustrations make the point for her. Lots of icons are great. Even sub-great icons tend to avoid the kitsch that besets much sub-great Christian art.

But she goes on to say that Western-style religious art is “accomplished and beautiful, but noisy. In their busy drama those paintings remain earthbound, superficial. Not that the content of such art is superficial; it may provoke deep thoughts or strong empathy. Yet, in a way that’s hard to define, icons touch a completely different interior level, something below the hectic arena of thought and emotion. Deeper down there is a place where we first confront life, before we decide what we think or feel about it. That is the intimate place where icons speak.” That reminded me of a painting I saw before I became Christian. I don’t remember who painted it, unfortunately, and although I’ve looked for it since my conversion I haven’t been able to find it.

It’s a painting of the Annunciation, from, I think, the Renaissance. The angel is rushing in, almost breaking in, with enormous energy. His wings are glorious–I seem to recall rainbows of color, but at any rate, they’re wild wings, astonishing. The angel is like an arrow aimed at Mary’s heart. Your gaze rushes along the angel’s body, down the outstretched arm, and along the stem of the lily he is offering the Virgin. And then your gaze skids to a halt against Mary’s upraised hand. She has recoiled from the awesome, awful sight; her hand and her whole body are tense. She looks afraid. She looks as if her whole life has just been overturned and she still does not really know how to respond.

She’s about to say yes. But she hasn’t yet.

The painting depicts the moment of choice; and it expressed exactly the combination of wonder, longing, and terror that I felt when I was trying to figure out if I should convert and what would happen to my life if I did. A non-Christian friend once wrote a brief poem about the Annunciation in which she said, “An angel is like an earthquake,” disrupting and overturning everything it touches. This painting showed that radical aspect of conversion. It showed God breaking into the world in order to rescue the world.

I’ll take a lot of “Precious Moments”-style kitsch in order to keep that painting of the Annunciation. As far as I can tell, it speaks directly to that “place where we first confront life.”

Similarly, Mathewes-Green writes, “You’ll notice that the use of blood here [in an icon of the Crucifixion] is restrained, almost delicate; the parallel stripes of golden red are laid down like threads. Icons do not show Jesus writhing in agony or excessively gory, as was sometimes done in Western art. In general, icons do not aim at deliberate emotional effect, which can slide so easily into sentimentality. While there is no doubt that Christ’s Passion involved real, and even gruesome, suffering, Jesus undertook it with divine dignity and of His own will.”

I’m deeply sympathetic to the anti-sentimentality stance. I think it was George Orwell, in one of his descriptions of the English character, who discussed the close kinship between sentimentality and brutality: Sentimentality is all about wanting to feel comfortable emotions, emotions that don’t challenge you, emotions that require nothing of you. Pity without a goad toward charity; tenderness toward the imagined Virgin or baby Jesus, but callousness toward actual women and children around you; the warm-bath feeling where your compassion just proves how good you, personally, are. That stuff is born in pride and ends in cruelty toward every real person who threatens to disrupt the pretty dream.

But I think on the question of representing Jesus’s suffering on the Cross, Mathewes-Green is wrong here. Christ’s death was bloody even for a crucifixion, itself one of the most horrible ways to die. There was the scourging, the crown of thorns, the lance in His side. God is trying to tell us something with all this blood, I think, and it would behoove us not to look away. Some of the grislier Spanish-style crucifixes seem to wallow in the gore, like a “Mortal Kombat” game. But many more simply present the death of Christ as it probably looked. It probably looked awful. To avoid that fact is, I think, anti-Incarnational, and Mathewes-Green’s book contains many vigorous defenses of the Incarnational in art. Rejecting representations of the “real, and even gruesome, suffering” strikes me as just as wrong as rejecting representations of the “divine dignity.”

It’s best, in my view, to have many different representations showing the different true aspects of what happened at Calvary. My beloved church in New Haven, where I was baptized and confirmed, has an imposing, dark, blocky crucifix showing Christ triumphant, reigning from the Cross. That is one true aspect of the Crucifixion. But the blood is also true. (One of the most striking pieces in the “Time to Hope” exhibit of Spanish Catholic art, shown at St. John the Divine Episcopal Cathedral after September 11, was a portrait of Christ scourged, crowned with thorns, cloaked in the mocking purple robe. But along the edge of the robe the painter had written the Agnus Dei. Breathtaking.)