The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. - book reviews

THOMAS F. MATHEWS Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. 208 pp.; 16 color ills., 122 b/w. $49.50

In 336, Donatus, bishop of Carthage (the founder of the schismatic "Donatist" church in Roman Africa), rebuked the imperial authorities: "Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia?" he wrote, "What has the emperor to do with the Church?"' Though uttered in pique (the emperor had given to his rivals funds for the care of the poor which Donatus himself had hoped to administer), these were fighting words. Thomas Mathews's The Clash of Gods is the work of an art-historical Donatist. He wants to exclude the emperor--the art and ceremonial associated with the emperor's person along with their absolutist overtones--from the artistic and, by implication, from the imaginative world of post-Constantinian Christianity, much as Donatus had wished to exclude him from the affairs of the Donatist church.

The Clash of Gods is written to free Early Christian art of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries from what Mathews calls "the incubus of imperial interpretation" (p. 179). A previous tradition of art history, in his opinion, had imposed on the interpretation of this art "The Mistake of the Emperor Mystique": that is, it was claimed that much of the Christian art of the period was consciously derived from prototypes in imperial art. And with the art came the ideology attached to such an art. By borrowing from imperial models in this manner, late Roman Christians were assumed to have swathed the figure of Christ in a thick wrapping of "latent memories" that charged his figure with the absolutist power of a Roman emperor. Mathews will have none of this. He rightly insists that Christians of that period thought of Christ as a god, not as an emperor. He further insists that they were perfectly capable of creating an art of their own to convey their message. Indeed, it was their ability to do this that was part of the secret of the Church's victory over paganism. In "a relentless war of images" (p. 21), the Christian art of the post-Constantinian period carried the greater "punch" (p. 14). This, so Mathews insists, was precisely because Christians looked away from the heavy-handed obsequiousness of the imperial court to a wider range of images--to images of the gods and to images associated with less elevated but imaginatively more appealing areas of late Roman society: to the suave and resolutely antimilitarist philosopher and even (Mathews suggests at length with impish delight) to raffish figures of the religious demimonde, to the magician and to persons of indeterminate gender. For Christ, Mathews assures us, won out because he was the right sort of god. He was "A god of the `little man,' a genuine `grass-roots' god ... a caring god, concerned" (p. 92). Thus, Early Christian art derived its appeal not from echoing the stuffy solemnity that still reigned in imperial circles, but from its ability to present to the grass roots the image of a new, accessible divinity, many of whose representations positively subverted the official art of the Establishment. It is of this streak in Early Christian art that Mathews writes with undisguised fervor.

For modern persons, it is a pardonable enthusiasm, Mathews's Early Christianity is so very nice. Emperors, as we all know, were usually far from nice. They tended to have authoritarian personalities. Their art was rigid and overbearing. It would be nice to think that it was a Christ of "Buddha-like pacifism" (p. 45), "non-military and non-imperial" (p. 62), whose images swept the Roman world. What a reviewer whose speciality lies not in, art history but in the social, cultural, and religious life of the post-Constantinian era must ask is whether such a Christianity ever existed; whether, or to what an extent, the Christian images of the time spoke with the voice of such a Christianity; or whether Mathews's Clash of Gods is based upon so large a measure of misunderstanding of what late Roman Christianity was likely to be like as to make his explanation of the sources, of the social and political context, and so of the power of Christian images in this period at best anachronistic, at worst an exercise in wishful thinking.

What no one can deny is that this is a book that needed to be written. In any vigorous discipline, it is an altogether licit pleasure to witness the cages of a Schultradition being well and truly rattled. The book speaks to legitimate and long-felt discontents. Scholars of the classical tradition, both in literature and in art, have been notoriously unwilling to allow the Christians of the pre-Constantinian and the immediately post-Constantinian periods to create anything new of their own. Classical scholars tended to assume that the art and culture of the Christians were virtually nonexistent; that they needed a "head start" from imperial and upper-class patrons to flourish at all. Recent work on the Christianity of the 3rd century has left little room for this supercilious supposition. It goes some way to meet Mathews's suggestions. The work of Sister Charles Murray, for instance, had already touched on late 3rd-century representations of Christ as a philosopher, even, indeed, as an Apollo Musagetes.(2)

The tendency to reduce so much of post-Constantinian art to imperial models also assumed a claustrophobically centralized world, where all pomp and ceremony centered on the emperor alone. The later Roman empire was not like that. As Michael McCormick has shown, "It is essential to grasp that the complex of symbolic gestures defining the emperor's public life ... was only the apex of a great upward. It did not always trickel downward from the court. This is a point which Mathews had already made in a previous study of the Christian liturgy of Constantinople.(4)

Altogether, the study of Early Christian art in this century has always been punctuated by moments of regret that Christian art seemed to owe so much to the conversion of the emperor Constantine and to the establishment of an imperial church. Scholars were tempted to think that some alternative source of artistic creativity must have existed for Early Christian and early medieval art, waiting to be discovered, somewhere on the fertile peripheries of the classical world, at a safe distance from the seemingly ever-present, crippling fact of empire. Not all such wishful thinking would strike a modern reader as salubrious. In 1923, Josef Strzygowski regretted "the oppressive influence of Semitic monarchism," in which "the divine figure is furnished with all the attributes of the despot." "In India," he pointed out, "Buddha is never depicted with the ruler's attributes." Late Roman Christian art, by contrast, was "the art of a spiritual and temporal autocracy of the old Semitic sense."(5)

Mathews avoids the erratic and, to a modern reader, highly unpleasant, tone of a Strzygowski. Strzygowski had looked to a distant, as yet undiscovered Kulturland for the nonimperial origins of Christian art. Mathews, by contrast, assures us that the imperial tradition was less present than we had thought. It existed only in the eye of a small but vastly influential group of modern beholders. Ernst Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar (followed by a host of lesser scholars) imposed an imperial source on Early Christian art by claiming to see "imperial" symbolism in scenes which, in the opinion of Mathews, need not bear any such interpretation. They did so, consistently and tenaciously, because they themselves still yearned (so Mathews suggests) for the vanished empires of their youth--for the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for the Russia of the Tsars: "The need to interpret Christ as an Emperor," Mathews concludes, "tells us more about the historians involved than it does about Early Christian art" (p. 16).

The few pages (pp. 16-19) that Mathews devotes to explaining why it was that Kantorowicz, Asfoldi, and Grabar came to place such emphasis on the imperial origins of so much of Early Christian art are an unnecessarily unattractive, because ungenerous, interlude in a book written, otherwise, con amore. They are bad intellectual history. Many decades ago, Arnaldo Momigliano warned of the dangers involved in treating the history of scholarship as an easy option, as a mere "Sunday pastime." He did so in a review that exposed the collusion with Fascism of which many of his near-contemporaries had been guilty. It is sad to see the wheel come full circle. Smug snap judgments on the cultural and political background of European academics are now used, as in this book, to delegitimize the contribution of a major scholarly tradition, by hinting that those who contributed to it were right-wing, monarchist, even sympathetic to Fascism.

What is lost in this lighthearted demonization of the past is any sense of the enduring complexity and of the intrinsic difficulty of the substantive intellectual problems that were faced by scholars in those times as in our own. It all becomes delightfully simple. Of A fold), for instance, we need only be told that he was unlike Theodor Mommsen, who "was personally involved in the contemporary liberal democracy movement in Germany," and, virtuous man that he was, studied the Roman republic. Alfoldi preferred to study the Roman empire: "On the eve of the Second World War he was writing about `Germania' as a personification of military virtue in Roman art" (p. 18). So now we know.

In fact, Alfoldi dedicated his study of Roman imperial insignia to "the immortal genius of Mommsen." He wished to add a "complementary study" that would be "worthy" of Mommsen's more strictly classical, juridical view of the Roman state. To go beyond Mommsen, in emphasizing the visual, emotive, and sacral basis of the imperial power was simply to recognize the limits of more optimistic classical notions. What the scholars described by Mathews had in common was, perhaps, less the fact of having once lived under empires, but, rather, the remarkable unifying force of a Europe-wide classical education. They shared in limitations which have, indeed, rested heavily on the study of the role of Christianity in the late antique world. They tended, whenever possible, to stress the continuity of the classical tradition and they suffered from a blind spot as to the intellectual and cultural resources of late antique Christianity. It would have been more helpful if Mathews, rather than indulging in brisk psychologizing, by speaking darkly of "nostalgia for lost empires" (p. 18), had addressed the very real limitations of the classical education of that time.

Indeed, to have been the subjects of fallen or declining empires in the 1920s and 1930s did not usually have the effect of instilling nostalgia for Their past Imperial Majesties. The effect, on many persons of classical education of all political persuasions, was to induce new doubt as to the rationality of the majority of their fellows. Alfoldi's work may be better seen against this wider background. It was part of a Europe-wide "discovery of the irrational" among classical scholars, shared by persons of impeccably liberal temperament such as Norman Baynes and, later, E. R. Dodds, and by a social historian such as Michael Rostovtzeff. As for Alfoldi's article, which, so Mathews implies, had "an unmistakable political ring": it dealt with the readaptation, by a 3rd-century Gallic usurper, of the imagery of conquered Germans derived from an earlier century. Its language, though dated by the standards of our own, politically more virtuous age, was temperate compared with the odious utterances current at the time. Its subject (the emergence of provincial armies as a force in late Roman politics) reflected interests shared by British and French scholars. It raised questions that are still with us today.

What matters more, however, is that, by adopting so dismissive an attitude to his predecessors, Mathews has made it that much harder for himself to establish his own, potentially very interesting, view of the true sources of Early Christian art. In creating a straw man, he has remained enthralled by it. "The Emperor Mystique," he complains, "explains all" (p. 16). But it has to explain all. For only then can it be dismissed in its entirety--once proved wrong on a single point--so as to be replaced, also in its entirety, by an exactly opposite explanation. Mathews is by no means the first scholar to warn us that the role of imperial themes in Early Christian art "should not be overestimated."(5) But this is something different. Mathews claims to be able either to banish imperial themes entirely from the explanation of many scenes, or to see them turned on their head in a Christian context. The reader is faced, at every turn, with a peremptory either/or. Either representations of Christ betray artistic conventions that must mirror faithfully the visual content of contemporary court ceremonials and imperial representations-and, further, must communicate the overbearing message associated with such ceremonials and representations--or they communicate, often, the exact opposite.

It is here that the problems begin. To take one small example: high-backed thrones, we are told, are associated with gods; emperors, by contrast, used the distinctive, backless sella curulis. Christ is usually shown on a high-backed throne. Christ, therefore, must have been thought of as a god and never as an emperor--or, if not as a god, at least as a philosopher, who, unlike an emperor, is a nice person. Now emperors do occasionally appear on high thrones. Mathews has to dismiss the massive medallions of Constantine that show him on such a throne by claiming that these were as exception--they did not circulate widely (p. 195, n. 5). Yet, apparently, provincial governors also show themselves on thrones; and they did so on their cutlery.(7) Meanwhile, Christ seems quite at home in what looks like one of the backless thrones that are illustrated as the prerogative of emperors and governors alone in figs. 76-79, on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus. He is shown on a similar seat in the newly revealed (and, alas, almost instantly destroyed) mausoleum at the Silivri Gate in Istanbul--a site which Mathews has made splendidly available to us all, in the collection of unusual and challenging illustrations that are the principal glory of this book.(8) Bears of little brain when it comes to iconographic argument, as is the present reviewer, can be excused if they feel that they have somehow missed the point. It does not seem as if"the imagery of seats is consistent" (p. 108).

What is more important is that readers who might wish to gain from The Clash of Gods a sense of what the later Roman empire was really like are presented with a starkly dualistic view of that world. Disabused and rigidly literal in his interpretation of imperial art and of its visual messages, Mathews exalts Christian art as a reservoir of anti-Establishment images. These images (and the groups to whose needs these images are presumed to have spoken) are hailed with a fervor that makes the most sentimental and upbeat narratives of the rise of the Christian Church seem dry-eyed.

Thus, when Christ enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey, we are urged to dismiss from our minds any association with an emperor's arrival in state. For the imperial adventus, Mathews warns us, was not a nice event. It had "some of the chilling effect of an old-fashioned missile parade in Red Square". While Christ, we know, is nice. With "smooth plump cheeks and a full mane of gentle curls", he rides a humble donkey--"working-class transport". In the East, he even rides sidesaddle, thereby "assuming a feminine role". We are dealing, in fact, with "an explicitly anti-imperial arrival ceremony". And Mathews tells us why. The wooden lintel of the Al-Moallaqa church in Cairo, on which Christ is shown riding sidesaddle, was dated, in 1957, to the period of the height of the Arian controversy, in the middle and late 4th century. It drew its effect from the issues raised at that stormy time. To emphasize that Christ was "fully and entirely God" and to show him, not simply freed of imperial associations, but positively adopting an "anti-imperial role" (p. 41) was to make a visual statement of immediate political relevance: "This anti-Arian art can be seen as anti-imperial on more than one level" (p. 52). Unfortunately, in 1986, the lintel in question was redated, apparently conclusively, to 734-35 A.D.(9) Given the difficulty of attaining certitude in Coptic archaeology, for a central piece of evidence for the precise, 4th-century doctrinal and political context of a major variant of an Early Christian image to be spirited away to the middle of the 8th century is merely a misfortune. But there was no need, in the first place, to construct the hypothesis that depended, for its confirmation, on such evidence.

The 4th century was not a tidy age. The contrasts were never as sharp as Mathews implies. It is possible to share Mathews's skepticism of an overly "imperial" interpretation of representations of Christ's entry into Jerusalem without subscribing to the alternative that he suggests. In the first place, Mathews cites, in confirmation of his own reading of the grim and distant nature of an imperial adventus, a hostile description: Ammianus Marcellinus did, indeed, think that the emperor Constantius II had overdone the military aspect of his arrival in state at Rome. But not every adventus was so overbearing. The notion was still suffused with a sacral glow. It was an image to which staunchly anti-Arian writers still warmed. The coming of Christ to earth (though not, it must be admitted, his entry into Jerusalem) was spoken of in terms that took the ceremonial of adventus in its double aspect-secular and religious-very much for granted: it had been both an epiphaneia, the euphoric shining forth of a god come close to men, and an epidemia, an awesome state visit.(10) This is not a world where imperial rituals of power were, as it were, held at a distance from the imagination of leading Christians. For, alas, in the later Roman empire, if not, fortunately, in our own more liberal times, power often meant protection and absolute power meant absolute protection. Christ, wrote Athanasius, came to a world that needed his presence in much the same way as a frontier city needed an imperial adventus: "such a city is greatly honored and no longer does an enemy or bandit come against it. " " In so serious a world, aware of much danger, playful inversions of basic rituals of power, though they might delight us sheltered moderns, were less well thought of than we might suppose.

In the second place, Mathews greatly exaggerates the significance of the Arian controversy in crystallizing Christian attitudes to the emperor, and hence in fostering the development of an autonomous art in the manner that he suggests. It was a brilliant intuition on the part of Erik Peterson that the end of the Arian controversy marked, also, the end of the possibility of representing Christ on the model of a human monarch, as the regal image on earth of the One God in heaven.(12) But the controversy itself was a messy affair. The more it is studied, the more its participants seem to have been considerably less perspicacious than the great German Religions-historiker. Mathews declares categorically that "historically, the most notable achievement of the fourth century . . . was the definition of the separation of Church and State." He has a soft spot for the "powerful bishops who defined the basis of the Church's freedom" (p. 89). It would, indeed, be pleasing to think that such robust souls, and their murmurous congregations, had both the time and the foresight to express their contestatory will by developing a set of potent counter-images to those associated with the imperial court. They probably did not. The best known of them, Ambrose, spent most of his career running hard to stand still: as Catholic, anti-Arian bishop of Milan, he "found his most authentic expression in . . . bluffing and opportunism."(13) The contestatory context that Mathews posits for the emergence of so many Early Christian images did not exist.

When, and if, the counter-images expounded by Mathews were mobilized, not every bishop was amused. On the issue of Christ as a magician, for instance, Augustine of Hippo remained impenitently square. He knew that pagans considered Christ to have been a skilled sorcerer. He also knew that they had been encouraged to think, on the strength of Early Christian representations of Christ flanked by Peter and by Paul (Paul, of course, had had no contact with Christ during his life on earth), that Christ had passed on his magic lore to both Apostles. It was only what you might expect: "They thoroughly deserve to err who have sought Christ and his Apostles not in sacred books but in pictures on walls. "(14)

Augustine, everyone now tends to agree, was a spoilsport. Nor do we need to posit a high degree of clerical involvement in the elaboration of Christian images. Nonetheless, it is hard to reconcile the few explicit opinions that we have on the subject of Christ as a magician (an accusation frequently made by pagans, and met with angry embarassment by Christians) with Mathews's contention. A church which owed its freedom to "powerful bishops" was unlikely to have fostered an anti-imperial politics of the image if this led to the emergence of so shady a character as the magician as the privileged model for the image of Christ. Mathews has pointed to a fascinating problem in the visual representation of Christ's miracles. But we may have to wait for a more complex answer than the one which he provides.(15)

Altogether, before we can begin to answer Mathews's question, "in whose voice do these images speak?" (p. 21), we must know more than this book offers us about the real relations of class and power in the late Roman world. For instance, of Christ was, as Mathews claims so frequently, a "god of the `little man,'" then scenes of his arrival in Jerusalem would hardly have taken him that much closer to the Christian rank and file if they were modeled on the arrival of a landowner on his estates--a visual theme for which, unfortunately, Mathews can provide only one example (fig. 15, p. 34). Such gentlemen were petty emperors in their own lands. Their daily life was that of a court in miniature--right down to the chanted acclamations of the servants, as they snuffed out the lights every evening.(16) Seeing their villas, the Christian poor murmured ominously: "Ipsi sold vivunt."(17) Without a sense of the realities of life lived in a profoundly hierarchical society, claims for the emergence of a new, "`grass-roots' god," complete with an appropriate array of subversive or "caring" images, must forever tremble on the brink of sentimentality.

Ultimately, Mathews expects more of images in Christian late antiquity than they were ever expected to give. Grabar's emphasis on the restraints imposed by a "classical language" of images may be out-of-date in many ways; but it has the merit of stressing what the existing language of art could not say to the Christian congregations of that time. On many issues that we know Christians to have taken seriously, their art was silent or, at best, tongue-tied.(18) Mathews seems to reject this caution. He appears to assume that the images that he has marshaled (and illustrated so handsomely) spoke as directly to the specific needs and feelings of their viewers as those in any Baroque or modern church: "People readily experienced visions in their presence" (p. 115). One may well doubt this. The only evidence for such an effect upon the viewer comes from a source of the 9th century. A revolution in Christian visual sensibility lies between that text, associated with the Iconoclast controversy in Byzantium, and the strangely reticent world of late antiquity, of over four hundred years previously. How the one world, its tongue still blurred by an ancient language, moved to the "speaking pictures" of a later age, and whether the "inherent strength" (p. 8) claimed by Mathews for so many Early Christian images played a part in that crucial development are questions which The Clash of Gods poses sharply. The book may not have answered the questions in a satisfactory manner. But it has, without a doubt, started up afresh the discussion of the origin, meaning, and impact of early Christian images. Mathews will not let us doze off again in the comfortable embrace of received wisdom. So much the better. Let us hope that the discussion will continue, with all the erudition and the intellectual courtesy which a topic of such importance, presented to us in this book with such verve, deserves to receive.

(1.) Optatus of Milevis, de schismate Donatistarum 3.3. Translations throughout this review are the author's.

(2.) Sister C. Murray, Rebirth and Afterlife: A Study of the Transmutation of Some Pagan Imagery in Early Christian Funerary Art, BAR International Series c, Oxford, 1981, 55-60.

(3.) M. McCormick, "Clovis at Tours: Byzantine Public Ritual and the Origins of Medieval Ruler Symbolism," in Das Reich und die Barbaren, ed. Evangelos K. Chrysos, Vienna, 1989, 164.

(4.) T. F. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy, University Park, Penn./London, 1971.

(5.) J. Strzygowski, The Origin of Christian Church Art, Oxford, 1923, 21, 161, 41 respectively. See Suzanne L. Marchand, "The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism," History and Theory: Theme Issue, XXXIII, 1994, 106-30.

(6.) Beat Brenk, "The Imperial Heritage of Early Christian Art," in Age of Spirituality: A Symposium, ed. K. Weitzmann, New York, 1980, 50.

(7.) A. Alfoldi, Die monarchische Reprasentation im romischen Kaiserreiche, Darmstadt, 1970, 247.

(8.) See also Johannes G. Deckers and Umit Serdaroglu, "Des Hypogaum beim Silivri Kapi in Istanbul," Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum, XXXVI, 1993, 140-63, esp. 147 and fig. 5c.

(9.) L. S. B. MacCoull, "Redating the Inscription of El-Moallaqa," Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik, LXIV, 1986, 230-34.

(10.) M. Tetz, "Ein enzyklisches Schreiben der Synode von Alexandrien (362), Zeitschrift der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft, LXXIX, 1988, 262-81, esp. 272.

(11.) Athanasius, De incarnatione 9.

(12.) E Peterson, "Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem," in Theologische Traktate, Munich, 1950, 102-5.

(13.) Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital, Berkeley, 1994, 377.

(14) Augustine, De consensu evangelistarum I .10.15-16; see Goulven Madec, "Le Christ des paiens d'apres le De consensu evangelistarum de Saint Augustin," Recherches augustiniennes, XXVI, 1992, 3-67, esp. 39-47.

(15.) On this issue, see Marie Therese Fogen, Die Enteignung der Wahrsager: Studien zur kaiserlichen Wissensmonopol in der Spatantike, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1993, 209-10.

(16.) Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 16.8-9.

(17.) Augustine, Sermo 345.1.

(18.) A. Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, London, 1969, 47.

PETER BROWN
Department of History
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ. 08544

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