Centralization and representation are Christian necessities. They're also inherent vulnerabilities. Here's what went sideways and what to consider for future restoration. In faith and culture.
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Time to wrap up the centralization in art and faith detour. It was important because we are looking for the historical roots of the dumpster fire that is “official” modern culture. We’re looking at art because you can… well… look at it.
Art expresses culture. It represents ideas and values that surround it then transmits them to future onlookers. Including us. It’s more complex – the values tend to be the elite, not the masses. But the elite have been driving this clown car. Figuring out how they went from
Carl Albert von Lespilliez, Ballroom, 1765-1770, Schaezlerpalais, Augsburg
to
Kengo Kuma & Associates, Aix en Provence Conservatory of Music, 2013
is worthwhile.
It’s been a long journey just to get here. But the Renaissance – meaning the time period, not the beast “historical construct” proved a major inflection point. And in looking at how art began the road to centralization, we realized some things about the representational nature of societal constructs.
The whole arts of the West journey is heading to an arbitrary target – the Armory Show of 1913. This was the symbolic arrival of European Modernism in America. We suspect the official story won’t be any truer that previous official stories we’ve looked at. But it is an influential thing that happened at a point that nicely prequels into the World War One posts and closes this circle of posts. We’re not willing to tackle the 20th century systematically at this point. There is too much wizardry and obfuscation around the historical record for even the limited depth we go into.
Consider what the Band does and...
Come on.
Anyhow.
In order to invert, art has to be centralized – that is, defined as a “thing” distinct from the rest of culture. It needs rules other than the raw ontological formulation of logos + techne. It’s in the Renaissance where genius artists and humanist theories concoct the foundations of this stand-apart art theory. That's what makes it such a huge step in the degeneration process - despite the quality and beauty of some of the art. Wait until we get to "Mannerism". The point is you have now established a secular transcendence as the basis of cultural expression through beauty. A set of man-made subjective desires impossibly masquadering as “objective” theoretical rules. It's false, but effective if people accept and act as if the rules were objective truth.
This is unnoticed for a while. Until it isn’t.
This is the graphic visualizing what appears to be gradual change along a continuum "suddenly" becoming the inverse of what it started as.
This is a critically important process to understand to grasp how subversion becomes full inversion.
Then we realized that the formula - [complex material representation of an immaterial abstract] replacing [the abstract] wasn’t limited to art. It's a ubiquitous reality of the perversion of bottom-up organic culture formation into the centralized oppression of the beast system. One more time for emphasis. It's that important.
A representational complex created to connect people with something intangible gets treated as if it was the original intangible referent
Since the representation is now taken as an end in itself, it is no longer bound to the terms or qualities of the thing it was originally created to represent. And once the representation - an arbitrary man-made creation - is decoupled from any external objective truth, it can be turned into anything anything. It's claims have become recursive and solipsistic - ie. false. But that doesn't matter if people continue to accept it as if it still were a truthful expression of what it no longer expresses. Art goes from Logos+Techne to whatever the Art! narrative engineers say it is. "Health care" becomes whatever corrupt, bought-and-paid-for administrative flacks need to push for their overlords. And Christianity becomes the inversions of Bible-rejecting luciferian materialists.
Michelangelo's Delphic Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The Bible doesn't explicitly state "don't paint pagan seers and nudes on church ceilings" so some moral reasoning is required.
It's not whether some sibyline prophecy came true. Fortune cookie messages sometimes are accurate. It's that the Sistine Chapel images construct a Christian history of Creation from Genesis to the Last Judgment. Adding pagan extras to a scriptural history that rejects them and their source of "insight" alters Christian metaphysics to include things that aren't Christian. Pretending pagan witches share the same divine sanction as Biblical prophets opens the path of making up whatever they want and calling it Christianity. Because once the representation is no longer restricted to Jesus' message, it's begun to replace that holy referent with do what thou wilt.
They don't stop a faithful Christian from being saved. But they show the formation of a "church" where salvation happens in spite of official positions. Which is a problem...
Consider how modern Christianity is as inverted as !Art– churchianity is also a form putting the representation before the referent. It’s another secular transcendence, even if the idolaters don’t recognize it. So inversive processes in the church is a relevant topic for understanding the inversion of the West today. It isn't the same as art, but it’s the same ontological pattern.
The Band defines the arts of the West as Logos+Techne. Truth and technical skill. The truth in art can be many things – including the highest level is ultimate reality. It's why the Church was a major promotor of the arts of the West. Art was a vehicle for representing immaterial Truths to a wide audience. That makes religious art a good indicator of degenerative trends in the contemporary church.
Upper Rhenish Manuscript Illumination with the Annunciation in an Initial R, from a Gradual, around 1300, tempera, ink and gold on parchment, Metropolitan Museum, New York
Take the Annunciation for example. It's always been a popular theme in religious art because the Incarnation is the central element in the Christian metaphysics of redemption. It's a joyful subject, and ties into the growing importance of Mary in the medieval Church. A major part in any life of Jesus or Mary cycle [click for a good piece on Annunciation symbolism in the Middle Ages].
Here's one from Switzerland with the basics. Gabriel announces to Mary while something - usually a dove - represents the arrival of the Son.
Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1426, tempera on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Here's one from a Florentine Renaissance master. There's International Gothic beauty and it's a bigger and more complex scene. There main elements are all clearly present. The changes only enhance the presentation.
Philippe de Champaigne, The Annunciation, 1644, oil on canvas,
The French Classical master adds a little baroque light and drama - it is the 1600s after all. The style keeps changing with the taste of the day. But the message is consistent. As is the formula - art = Logos+Techne.
Carl Heinrich Bloch, The Annunciation, 1880s, oil on canvas, Frederiksborg Palace, Copenhagen
Bloch is a Danish artist that missed the Modernism memo. He's added some Romantic luminosity and made Mary more awestruck. It's a different interpretation of the scene, but fully consistent with the meaning of the event. Logos and techne.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation, 1898, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
American Tanner painted his after a trip to the Holy Land and went for a realist approach to Mary. He maxed out the contrast be presenting Gabriel as a beam of light. The supernatural symbols aren't there, but it's a faithful and respectful telling.
Now in between Bloch and Tanner we get a different variation on the Annunciation. Heading down that modern road of de-moralization and inversion.
Arthur Hacker, The Annunciation, 1892, oil on canvas,
Making celebratory religious themes weirdly inappropriate or disturbing is one entry to inversion. Like depicting Mary as an ugly anorexic Ferengi with an eroticized Gabriel in some bizarre opium garden.
An essential thing to keep in mind with inversion is why do it this way? Why in the history of joyous Annunciations would you make it off-putting and uncomfortable? Inversion doesn't happen in one shot. There is still considerable techne here. But the logos is gone...
Angelo Biancini, The Annunciation, 20th century, laquered trash, Museum of Modern Religious Art, Vatican Museum
Modernism comes with the jettisoning of techne too. Just some crappy modern "religious art" from the Vatican Museum.
It's always jarring when you look at modern Art! after seeing other things.
Now - of all these artists and styles, guess which one has his own dedicated room in the Vatican Museum...
A good indicator of degenerative trends in the contemporary church.
Both art and church decline for the same reasons – representation replaces referent. The problem is that representations – no matter how well intentioned – are just material signs. Their link to higher realities is referential not existential. If the Church or art replace what they were created to represent, then they’re ontologically empty husks. ![Christ’s saving message] or ![Logos and culture] reference only themselves. Christianity or art reduced to nothing more than the cluster of material signs.
And the material world is entropic, Fallen, and invariably ends in death.
The historical developments of art and church are totally different. Different timelines, socio-cultural positions, purposes, etc. But consider the pattern at the general level. Art as a designated area of culture production and the church as a designated vehicle for Christianity are extensive, complex, socio-cultural creations that represent the immaterial in accessible, practical material form. Things that weren’t visible or obvious become so. Despite their myriad differences, both are representations in the broadest sense.
The word art came from ars and carries connotations of knowledge - of objective truth.
Sandro Botticelli, A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts, around 1484, fresco, Louvre Museum
The Band's formation – Logos+Techne or L+T – is the skillful material expression of an immaterial abstraction. The skill in distinguished art from mere symbols. These can overlap – works of art can be symbols. And the nature of the skilled making can vary. Preferences in materials, techniques, media, etc. are culturally determined and depend on time and place.
Church comes from ekklesia and means Christian gathering.
The reference here is much loftier than the broad truths of art. Because the church represents knowledge of ultimate reality via Christ’s message – the ontologically highest and most remote level.
Artworks can also represent ultimate reality – it’s why the church uses art. The point isn’t to define these as mutually exclusive. They’re too unalike in structure and socio-cultural place for that. It’s to recognize both as representational complexes that were intended to make the immaterial or otherworldly accessible. Yes, we can read an authoritative representation of Christ’s message and ministry in the Bible. But the church transforms it into a lived, historically contextualized and relatable form. It also provides the venue for collective activities like baptism and fellowship that the Bible calls for but require more than one reader.
The differences go beyond the nature of the referent – they’re historical and formal too. Art only begins to appear as a distinct cultural area in the later Middle Ages. And it doesn’t start getting theoretically formalized until the Renaissance – when organic picture-making is jacked by secular transcendence-huffing humanists.
Jean-Baptiste Martin, L'Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1712-1721, oil on canvas, Louvre
Once theoretical apparatus comes into existence, the extended representation develops – places, people, rules, etc. The Logos and then the techne are completely replaced in Modernism.
The church begins organizing right away. The Book of Acts and the following Epistles picks up in the immediate aftermath of the Ascension and shares a lot about the earliest efforts to spread the Word. The following epistles address practical applications of Jesus' message. There's obviously more to them, but it's clear that Christian organization was a necessary consequence of growth in ways that it wasn't for art. As the Gospel spreads into new contexts, the time since Jesus lengthens, and external pressures come to bear, message consistency is imperative.
Sir James Thornhill, Paul Preaching in the Areopagus, 1729-31, oil on canvas, Royal Academy, London
Jesus’ message is fixed and specific in ways that the more flexible logos of art is not. And the stakes are infinitely higher – existentially high. Hence message consistency and order, dispute resolution and teaching. All things that don’t apply to picture-making in the same way.
This means that dogmatic materialism is a threat to the church from the jump, while it only poisons the arts of the West much later.
Dogmatic materialism meaning a subset of secular transcendence that refers to representations, not a "philosophical school". The Band doesn't care at all if a Philosopher's Name & some arbitrary jabbering have been appended to a noun. If secular transcendence is the false pretense that timeless abstractions inhere in temporal reality, dogmatic materialism refers to the false pretense that timeless abstractions inhere in material representations. Specifically man-made things, rather than material reality in general. With art, it was 'what the theories say' rather than L+T, and that took a while.
With the church it was clearly a concern from the start.
Anonymous, Paul in Athens, oil on canvas, 19th century, private
When Christianity spread into the Greco-Roman world, it encountered an image culture that was unique in antiquity. Not even the Persians or Egyptians had adapted painted, sculpted, carved, drawn, mosaic, and what ever other kind of image into every aspect of life.
The establishment of the new religion in this image-centric environment is the most likely explanation for the appearance of Christian art by the end of the 2nd century.
The point is not to imply church and art are “the same”. One is an existential necessity, the other a visual form of cultural expression and communication. What is the same is the ontological pattern – complex representation of something abstract and timeless. And since the representation is necessarily made out of fallen, entropic, ever-changing material reality, it is under continual pressure to corrupt. Because fallen nature is corrupted, despite the unchanging nature of the referent.
This brings in another observation – moral entropy. This is what we call the inherent Fallen human tendency to degrade morally over time without continual effort to the contrary. It’s basically the slippery slope applied to personal moral positions. Yesterday’s transgressive becomes today’s norm. We already considered it in the avant-garde-counterculture pattern – where what was the cutting edge of edgy becomes the new baseline.
Juni Ba, Chasing the Dragon, digital art
Chasing the dragon, diminishing returns, familiarity breeds contempt, when the thrill is gone - lots of words for it. It's the inversion of positive improvement traits like natural resistance or strength and conditioning.
But it's even more basic across generations. Your parents' hard-won "liberties" are your boring norm. Unless liberties tearing down norms aren't elevated to "principles". Like cultural traditions as a counter for moral emtropy.
Moral entropy is one of the empirically observable symptoms of the Fall. A physical pattern in the material world of human behavior that we can see.
Cultures always have transgressors – it’s an equilibrium between moral structures and the morally entropic human tendency to push against them. It’s only recently that the idea of moral structure altogether was removed and replaced with pure relativism. Do what thou wilt. The rapid degeneration since the second half of the 20th century – when compared to past eras – is a result of replacing the equilibrium of rules and self-will with pure self-will. With no corrective standard, the beast system is in a death spiral. What follows? A return to moral strictures or authoritarian tyranny. But “freedom” is a fake construct that unchecked must end in anarchy and a new order. Or an extinction event.
You can see the parallel with physical entropy – both physically and spiritually, the Fallen world points only to dissolution and death.
Moral entropy ensures that moral message consistency is neither a neutral state or naturally occurring. The natural state is an active tendency towards corruption. Like physical entropy
If standards aren’t actively upheld, degeneration is inevitable until something again forces order.
Jesus’ message is a radical rejection of entropic, fallen worldly blandishments for the abstract and timeless Kingdom of the Father. The render unto Caesar-render unto God division of the worldly and heavenly authority is only the political part of it. He excoriates “religious authorities” that put gesture and ritual over the will of God until they plot his death. There is nothing of metaphysical substance in material stuff. Neither the prestige-chasing of the Pharisees or Paul's statues and temples "made with hands". All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again (Ecclesiastes 3:20).
Band readers know from the Ontological Hierarchy that the Law alone is will fail.
Gustave Doré, Moses Breaks the Tables of the Law (Ex. 32:19), 1866, engraving from Doré's English Bible
The Old Covenant was based on fallen, subjective, entropic people maintaining an abstract, timeless, unchanging standard. On the one hand, they “chose” not to live up to it. On the other, the inherent impossibility of secular transcendence - of absolutes inhering in finite material - means they couldn't succeed if they wanted to. The Old Testament represents that the Fallen nature of man precludes measuring up to absolute standards on our own.
Paolo Veronese, Baptism of Christ, around 1580, oil on canvas, Pitti Palace, Florence
Jesus reaffirms the Law, but the mechanism of grace – repentance and forgiveness of sins – compensates for fallen material limits. True intent becomes all important – only God can know the heart, so only God knows if repentance and belief are sincere.
This is the opposite of pubic gestures that are purported representations of an inner state. Because we know representation can lie.
The New Covenant puts your salvation in your hands. Believe and repent when you fall short or don’t. No magic words, no magic rituals – either faith or not. Which is great until socio-cultural representations need to be made to ensure message consistency and guide Christian life.
The core issues were worked out over the last few posts.
Centralization is the inevitable consequence of any broad social complex once it grows past a certain size. Simple effectiveness needs some structural organization for execution and oversight. But this is also inevitably corrupting because centralized structures place many under the command of one or few. It’s much easy to subvert, jack, and invert a small command node then persuade or coerce everyone individually.
Centralized systems also reinforce the commanding authority by group conformity and the pressures and coercion that comes with that.
When full centralized autocracy reaches a point of full inversion there is no path within the system to assert truth or oppose evil and lies.
Representation and Inversion looked at what is involved in translating immaterial objective truth into entropic material form. Representation is referentially similar to and ontologically different from the reference at the same time. This makes it complicated.
Referential similarity is what makes communication possible. How we can know anything outside of direct experience and “understand” anything at all. This means representations have to have some degree of familiarity. They need to be recognizable to be meaningful – from numbers to socialized behavior. Variations in the familiar express novel ideas or events.
To describe this orange implies knowledge of concepts like the orange color, a circle, and pebbled texture.
To recognize the picture means being able to associate a two-dimensional likeness with a 3d object.
That's representation - neither the all the same nor completely disconnected from the referent.
When you think about it, communicative and representational processes are way more fundamental, fluid, complex, and amazing than theorists of any kind recognize. Whether they're pretending there's nothing to reality but representations or that representations can be taken as totally interchangeable with represented reality. And it's one thing when the both are material things - at least a picture of an orange and an orange look somewhat alike. It's even more acute when the referent is immaterial - like Christian Truth. Substituting the material representation for the immaterial referent in the mind of the perceiver opens the door to secular transcendence.
It's clearer when you can see it.
The target of devotion is Jesus who I know through the church
becomes
The target of devotion is the church - or something in it like a picture or rite
Or
Diego Velázquez, detail of Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid
An artist combines techne and Logos to make beauty
becomes
Thomas Hoepker, Willem De Kooning in his East Hampton studio, 1997, archival pigment print, Galeria de Babel
An artist follows theorist’s rules to degrade culture.
And because they’re not the same, the representation doesn’t have to be referentially accurate. Representations can lie. They can claim to be expressing one thing while actually expressing something else. This is what makes mistaking representational complexes for their referents so deadly – it can point you directly away from the thing you think it’s communicating.
The lesson...
Centralized inversion needs representational complexes
to control and invert.
Like the PST. Invert the central control and the body has a hard time not following. Most of it anyhow.
If artists organically work out ways to express logos through techne that appeals to their communities, there is no way to invert them all. If artists serve a theoretical complex called Art! that imposes top-down rules and controls the purse strings, then you have a representation that doesn’t have to express logos or anything else. It’s centralized representation. And if the overseers direct it towards degenerative ugliness and lies, representation becomes inversion. Actual art is untouched in the abstract, but new venues will be needed.
Change vs. Meaningful Change looked at how the centralized inversion of representational complexes happens. All secular transecendence is based on the self-idolizing lie – knowingly or not – that abstract absolutes can inhere qua themselves in temporal entropic matter or fallen subjective human minds. Centralized representational complexes being taken for their referents then perverted into dyscivic inversions.
Expand the diagram
1. Truth is represented
It can't be perceived directly so signs or sign complexes are necessary
2. The representation is taken for the truth
Because it's the representation - and not the immaterial truth - that people see, they think of the representation as the
3. The representation is inverted
Once the external referent has been gotten rid of, there is nothing to stop the representation from becoming whatever the controller says it is.
The catch is that the now-disconnected and inverted representation is still presented as standing for the Truth it disconnected from and inverted. In the case of "the Church", Jesus' message becomes whatever the narrative engineers want it to be.
The core lie in this process is material timelessness - an aspect of secular transcendence or the fallacy that infinite things can inhere in finite materiality. It's not just religion - consider how often you hear things like endless love, forever and ever, happily ever after, etc. In most cases, professing a human thing is fundamentally changeless is just metaphorical. No one expected Romeo and Juliette to literally live forever, even if they managed to successfully elope and start a new life elsewhere. But when it comes to religion, too many liars suggest magic words and talismans have real metaphysical power on their own.
The thing is, we know the material world is temporal and constantly changing on every level.
Consider a person – over the course of life we never stop changing.
There is continuity of consciousness, but beliefs and opinions, perceptions of the world, and appearance change. Sometimes totally. We go places and do things that we can't remember and others that we would change if we could. We are the same in terms of biological continuity - genetic makeup, etc. But we are in constant flux by any other metric.
There can’t be “timeless” material representations. But what there can be is message consistency through the changes. Look at these scenes - one from the oldest discovered house church, the other from the 19th-century Russian master of water.
Jesus and Peter walk on water from the Dura-Europos house church, between 233-256, fresco, Yale University Art Gallery; Ivan Aivazovsky, Jesus Walking on Water, 1888, oil on canvas, private
The two are completely different in style, materials, and organization. But they depict the same thing in ways that don't contradict the Biblical miracle. If you accept the legitimacy of non-idolatrous Christian art, both of these are acceptable representations of the story. Despite looking totally different. The issue isn’t whether things change – they have to. What matters is whether the core message – the referent – continues to be conveyed or is inverted into something else. That is, whether the change is meaningful or not.
The same holds for art.
The Annunciation from a Book of Hours in Latin and French, illuminated manuscript on vellum, around 1460, private; Albert Bierstadt, El Capitan, Yosemite, 19th century, oil on canvas, private
The International Gothic and American Sublime are both historic efforts to visualize metaphysical glory. Both require refined skill in well-defined stylistic areas. This means both are examples of Logos+techne - the Band's definition of the arts of the West. They're art. But they don't look the same.
Things are always changing - what matters is message consistency.
And in a material reality defined by continual flux and change, Band readers know how to avoid lies and reject inversion. Moral reasoning.
By the fruits.
Compatibility vs. necessity – making representations, managing changes, and maintaining message consistency lead here. That is, distinguishing what is essential to the referent from what is incidental. Remember the critical point that seems perpetually forgotten - representation and referent are ontologically different. Reference means understanding something through something else that is not the same.
This means that the inevitable differences can’t pertain to the core meaning or nature of the referent. They have to be incidental and not contradict key points. Take a Biblical text example - a snippet from Matthew 7:21. First the NIV and KJV versions side-by-side
does the will of my Father
doeth the will of my Father
Already we can see two different representations - two character strings that don't look the same - that mean the same thing. Then consider the Greek - with a literal translation provided.
ποιῶν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ Πατρός μου
doing the will the Father of me
A string of completely different characters and another different looking English version. Not one is the same representation as another, and the Greek is utterly distinct. But they're all consistent with Christ’s message. The representations are different or changing but in ways that stay compatible with the necessities of the referent.
Christ heals a possessed man in the synagogue of Capernaum, 11th century, Romanesque fresco in Lambach Abbey, Austia; The Sermon on the Mount from the Holkham Bible Picture Book, 1327-1335, British Library Additional 47682 f.23
It doesn't matter if the message is delivered indoors or in a field. Nor would it matter if Jesus were wearing a sweater or a jacket rather than his robes.
Changes in representations that stay compatible with the necessities of the referent are incidental.
"It’s ok to venerate idols" or "you can expect to be saved without believing in the Son of Man" contradict aspects of Christ’s message. Believe in me and obey the Commandments. Representations that assert such things change in ways that are incompatible with the necessities of the referent. They’ve become representations of something else. And if you expect church to be a conduit to the salvation promised by Christ’s message, you’re in existential trouble.
Centralization, Representation and Inversion, Change vs. Meaningful Change, and Compatibility vs. Necessity are a chain of topics that form a template and argument for moral reasoning.
Su Blackwell, book sculpture
In a fallen world of constant change, representations of truths do not share the inherent truthfulness of the truths they claim to represent. They might be compatible, or they might lie. Jesus told us to judge by the fruits – whether the messenger is consistent with what they are supposed to be messaging.
Being clear on the dangers of centralization, the difference between representation and reality, and the relationship between change and necessity are how you can do that.
Church refers to a vast complex of designated people and things founded on unchanging and immaterial authority. The seeds of trouble are there from the beginning. Jesus message is a radical rejection of worldly blandishments and status. Again and again he castigates authorities that that put religious representation – public prayer and gesture, hierarchy, etc. above God’s Law.
The End of Herod, 11th century, Romanesque fresco in Lambach Abbey, Austria
Consider what finally kills Herod after all his monstrous crimes.
And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost. Acts 12:21-23
But on the other hand, authority is inherently necessary also - especially as the socio-material representational complex grows. Ananias and Simon Magus are struck down for violating the principles of the developing faith. The apostles spread the Good News around the ancient world. Hence the need for representational message consistency grows alongside Christianity itself.
Guido di Graziano, Fall of Simon Magus, between 1278-1302, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena
Caesar on the left, rightful Christian authority on the right, and false spiritual power plunging to its death.
So it isn't a question of leadership or not, but the correct leadership. And how do we assess this? The way Jesus tells us to - by the fruits.
As Christianity spreads through Greece and into Rome it encounters totally different cultures from the Biblical roots. Peter and Paul weren’t Roman, but their church was. This means the changing representation “church” forms in the assumptions and structures of Imperial Rome. It’s hard to overstate the differences between the later empire and the world of the Old Testament.
Roberto Bompiani, A Roman Feast, late 19th century, oil on canvas, Getty Center
And not just the alien politics and morals of divine emperors & the moldering carcass of Romanitas. The Greco-Roman tradition had developed an entire culture around the making and use of images. There are Arts of the West post that looked at some of that, but those barely scratched the surface. Think of Greek myth with bronze men and Medusa's literally petrifying face. The invention of theater arts and painting figures and scenes on most anything. The Roman ancestor busts and depictions of gods in every house. Public statues, painting, mosaics everywhere. Artists getting famous and winning prizes, whole branches of writing devoted to art and artists... It's crazy. when you really think about it. Images were woven into every part of life.
From imperial altars like the Augustan Ara Pacis to private homes like the Aldobrabdini Wedding - ancient Roman culture was steeped in images. Early Roman Christians quickly start figuring out visual symbolism for their new religion.
The image culture that had developed around religion by the first century was more extensive than anything in the ancient Biblical Middle East. Religion was statue-based, from the cult idols of the gods to the ubiquitous images of the divine emperor. Hard to get much further in spirit from the Second Commandment.
Roman cult statuette of Kybele, 1st–2nd century AD, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Small-scale version of the main cult image of a Anatolian goddess that became popular in the Greco-Roman world. Many of these copies exist and were used by individual worshippers. It was believed that the invisible essence of a god could temporarily occupy a cult statue, making them available to hear prayers.
Emperor Augustus as Jupiter, 1st century AD, marble, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersberg, Pharaoh Senwosret III, 1836-1818 BC, granite, Brooklyn Museum
The Roman cult of the divine emperor fits into this image-based religion. The idea that the king becomes a god and is accessible by statues is an older - it goes back to Egypt. The Romans brought it into the origins of the West like many Egyptian ideas. Different style, same concept.
Antinous as Osiris from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, 130 AD, Louvre Museum
Don't take our word for it. Here's Hadrian's "divinized" rent boy in the guise of Val Kilmer an Egyptian god. Roman image culture, Egyptomania, and degeneracy in one image.
Not hard to see why a strict early Christian apologist like Tertullian (155-220 AD) would emphasize the importance of not worshipping images.
Quote from Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book II, Ch. 22; Johann König, The Brazen Serpent, between 1601 and 1642, oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Tertullian is sometimes positioned as an iconoclast, when is position is better described as anti-idolatry. The Band suspects that imagery was too endemic in late imperial society to reject it altogether. What was necessary was to rule out misuse. That is, the worship of cult statues, depictions of divine emperors, and other idols. Purely semiotic or representational images were acceptable. They have to be - all communication or understanding is representational.
As previously noted, the idea of a scriptural canon in predicated on faith. There is no other way to confer abstract truth on a textual representation that came into the world through human hands at a knowable point in time. Likewise, there has to be a means of differentiating the true message from misleading contemporaries. Again, don't take our word for it - here are Paul's epistles from the New Testament.
Joseph-Benoît Suvée, The Predication of Saint Paul, 1779, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Just three examples of the message consistency that is a recurring theme in his letters. Of course, one doesn't have to listen to Paul, but if they claim to be a Christian, they need to present an argument as to why their personal judgment supersedes scriptural canon in authority. That is, how they are not the seducing spirits following their own lusts that he cautions about. And if they can exert editorial authority over scriptural canon, which books are truthful? Obvious nonsense is obvious. And yes, we are aware of Luther engaging in this editorial retardery in his Bible translations.
It's simple objective observation that the Christian accepts certain texts as divinely-inspired truth. Scriptural canon is a hard border. There is no shortage of ostensive early Christian works that are roughly contemporary with the Bible but were left out for varying reasons. One is free to treat these as all historical sources, but then they aren't Christian dogma.
Many such works are included among the famous Dead Sea Scrolls (seen on the left) or the Nag Hammadi Library. These are historically interesting, but their exclusion from scriptural canon fundamentally distinguishes them from the Bible.
At some point, the faith-based epistemology of ultimate reality has to rest on something accessible to material minds. For Christians, that is canonical scripture.
The later epistles in the New Testament describe the activities of the apostles in the formation of early Christian communities. Paul refers to "church" as meaning both local Christian groups - Thessalonians, Philippians, etc. - and the universal body of Christ. One is geographical and cultural, the other theological. This is the reason "church" predates formalized scripture. But the Christian communities Paul describes are so different from the Constantine and the imperial church as to be almost unrecognizable.
It's how we get Jesus in Imperial purple enthroned on the world in a 6th-century mosaic from San Vitale in Ravenna. He is king of heaven, but the inclusion of the courts of Emperor Justinian and Theodora in the lower corners as "parallels" is a satanic inversion that contradicts the Biblical distinction between heaven and earth. Or God's and Caesar's in an earlier post.
And Paul continually warns about false disciples muddying the waters with bogus dogmas. Message consistency was a problem before the Bible canon was formed!
We don't have names for these deceivers, but there is plenty of variety - and heresy - in the writings of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The intellectual culture of late antique Alexandrea has come up in occult and regular posts as a hive of synchrony. Even before Christianity, Philo of Alexandria was trying to marry Neoplatonism with Judaism. Later it became a hub of Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought. Check out the occult post link at the top of the site for more.
It wasn't all bad - typological exegesis was and remains a useful way to relate the two testaments. But even this sort of allegorical reading will be corrupted by applying it to extra-Biblical sources. And not just Hermes Trismegistus, the Sibylline Oracles and the rest. The blasphemous installation of the emperor as "image of Christ" is a Neoplatonic perversion.
Vasily Sazonov, Saints Constantine and Helena present the Holy Cross, before 1870
The good news is none of this necessarily contradicts the message of the Gospels. If the ruler simply maintains a moral social order and protects the church - the body of believers - then his grandiose claims don't interfere with individual salvation.
All societies have ways of organizing and doing things. The problem is when men begin to impose on the relationships Jesus laid out in ways that don't just add social obligations, but alter the thrust of scriptural canon and the early works of the apostles.
It's during the Renaissance that a lot of early Christian heterodoxy is reinserted back into the Church. The central factor is the humanist fallacy that old = true. This fueled the raw idiocy that "classical antiquity" was epistemologically purer than the Christian Middle Ages that they invented as a period. And this ultimately led to the idea of a "first theology" that would unify Christian thought with paganism. We've gone over this enough times in earlier posts. What matters here is that b.s. early Christian texts also became "authoritative" on account of being old. Any onto-epistemologically coherent Christian metaphysics would greet quotations from imperial sycophants like Lactantius with a resounding "who cares".
Antonio Federighi, Eritrean Sibyl, 1456, marble, Orvieto cathedral
You know it's the Renaissance when pagan witches start turning up in houses of Christian worship. But to the Renaissance proto-luciferians humanists, these were "sources" to raise demonic priestesses sibyls to the status of Old Testament prophets! Thus "proving" "Christian" truth is not exclusively Biblical. Not tradition-based either. But rather something open to arbitrary revision by random sinners.
“We’re not idolators and pagans – Lactantius said it’s ok!” [click for link]. And Lactantius can’t be a blaspheming liar, imperial flack shill, or reeking pile of feces because he’s “early Christian”! So we get to have paganism in the church!
The only reason to recessitate long forgotten self-pleasurers and liars is subversion. To muddy the legitimate scriptural waters with “other old dudes that said different”. There is literally nothing inherent in the date of writing that correlates ontologically with truth. The Renaissance aim was an early example of the ongoing satanic attempt to pervert Christian truth with a fake universalism that is contradictory by definition. All the unitarianisms and ecumenicisms that follow walk in the same brimstone-reeking hoofprints.
It hasn't stopped. Including the sulferous reek.
The error is an epistemological one. Christianity doesn’t make age of message a metric of truth value. Both the Law and Grace are radical reversals of the old order – the truth is the new. Greco-Roman historiography was based on steady decline, but without a Fall. Steady moral entropy within a constant universe and not an ontological rupture. Thus connecting truth and other moral indices to age in a way that’s opposite Christianity.
The reality is that the litmus test remains the same for all deceivers, regardless of century.
Whenever frauds impose meaningful change on fixed Christian truth, the broad agenda is always the same. Remember - all we have are representations. No one can see God or His will qua God. Limits of discernment are absolute, and anything above the material can only be accommodated materially. We have semiotic references accepted as truthfully referencing the absolute on faith. And since Christ's physical mission ended at a fixed point in time, there is no capacity for addenda. Some religions like Mormonism or Islam claim further revelations, but these make them metaphysically incompatible with Christianity. They are irreconcilably different.
The frauds who push metaphysical alterations or new "mandates" are invariably trying to change existing representation for some personal, subjective, worldly preference for something that isn’t the referent.
Portrait of Alexander VI Borgia, 1490, marble, Bode Museum
Note how Paul describes his suffering and humility in the service of Christ while medieval and Renaissance popes - like the shockingly corrupt Alexander VI Borgia - dwelt in palaces and wore cloth of gold.
This happens when fake “sources” and "authorities supplement or alter the original representations while calling themselves the same thing. External objective referent - representation of Christ and his message - is subverted into subjective internal desire. Whether Neoplatonic image-emperors or Imperial popes. The new representations pay lip service to the truth, but do what thou wilt. Meaningful change ensues.
Which is how you wind up with things like the 4th-century invention of clerical celibacy in direct contradiction of the Bible (1Timothy 1-13).
Either the Bible is divinely-inspired Truth or it's just another book. Both are faith-based beliefs, and are mutually exclusive.
The problem for the modern West is that representation has largely supplanted referent in institutional Christianity of all stripes. The contemporary Catholic hierarchy is an abomination. The only path forward is the Sedeprivationist one, though it still requires metaphysical faith in human material activities that are a) historically identifiable as acts of human agents and b) changes from either scripture or the first Christian centuries. This isn't "opinion", it's objective historical observation.
Pierre Subleyras, Benedictus XIV, 1741, oil on canvas, Palace of Versailles
If a 18th-century pope can transform the terms of canonization, then the nature of the relationship between man and God is mutable. Don't take our word for it - the Vatican describes how something can become different and still be the same. This is an admission that the church traffics in representations, not the essence of God qua God. That is timeless and eternal. The form of representation called "saint" changes as representations do.
What matters is that the new representation represents the same thing it did before.
The essential point is that idolatry refers putting something man-made ahead of God rather than representing something of God truthfully. Shifting the sort of figure officially singled out as an example of ultimate holiness doesn't contradict Jesus' message - so long as the standard remains legitimate holiness. There is no formal canonization in the Bible, so saints accommodate - represent - "exemplary piety" in material terms. And the material is constant change. What matters is that the changing material representation remains compatible and with the spiritual referent. That is remains Christian.
The Sedeprivationist position is that recent changes in the Church do meaningfully turn away from scriptural and / or traditional Truth. They are not Christian. They are heretical, and promulgating them costs the perpetrators their positions. The institutional "seats" of authority are empty because the impostors claiming them have no right to do so.
The Sedeprivationist - and Sedevacantist - position is tiny and marginal within the fallen and corrupted official "church". A good sign for the remnant, but damning for the lost followers of the demonic occupiers. The Band assumes that those of legitimate faith may be saved by Jesus' words in the Bible, but we have no authority to speak on that.
Protestantism was supposed to solve the problem of human will imposing on Jesus' message by hewing closely to scriptural canon. Of course Luther kicked that off by altering canon - hardly an auspicious start. Nor did it take long for a "priesthood of all believers" to morph into dueling cults of personality around sociopathic control freaks in pulpits. Today it is difficult to find a Protestant denomination that promotes anything like strict Biblical - or Apostolic - Christianity.
It's as if ditching an indulgence-peddling idolatrous potentiate became carte blanche to do as thou wilt. To the point where the deviations from scripture exceed those offences that triggered the Reformation in the first place.
The inconvenient truth is that Christianity requires representations. There is no other way to transmit Christ's saving message and bridge the ontological gap between ultimate and material reality. And those representations will be temporally and culturally flavored because all representations are. It's inherent in the man-made nature of representation. The challenge is to ensure message consistency - the same referent - while costumes and styles come and go. It's symbiotic, but moral reasoning - the abstract interface between trans-temporal ultimate reality and time-bound material reality - has to be.
The need for message consistency means that some form of centralization is necessary if you want to have functioning Christian institutions. "aFunctioning" meaning truthfully conveying the expressed will of God to the faithful. Even if it opens the possibility for corruption and inversion.
The vault of the 5th-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna is a vertical representation of the situation. Individual Christian saints - in the Roman costume of their time - surround a squared dome. In the corners, the structural supports contain symbols of the four Gospels. And at the top, an abstract symbol of the salvation offered by God's universal rule. It's hierarchical, truthful representation. God's will, through scripture, and into Christian life.
Here it is from another angle. Note the solemn appeal of the message consistency that echoes through the ages. Despite differences in architectural and artistic styles and the dress of the Christians.
So the situation is not totally bleak. It never is. The basic charge to believe and keep the commandments doesn't change. The Band has no way of confirming this, but if the Bible is a truthful representation, individual Christians are saved by believing and keeping the commandments. Paul's epistles provide more instruction on the outlines of moral life. Returning to the monarchical medieval Church, we suspect that the faithful were saved in spite of their corrupt and self-worshipping leadership. And since the Truth doesn't actually change, the same is likely true today. Far from ideal, but far better than the institutional alternatives. And something that preserves the possibility that honest representations will rise again.
