In all of early patristic literature, Origen (Princ. I.1.8) gives the most uncompromising and principled Christian statement of God’s essential invisibility he is not visible to soe yet invisible to others (as implied in the Hebrew Bible and in various Greek religious traditions) but is invisible to all persons, because given the nature of God’s invisible being it is impossible for any human to see God. This represents an extreme form of what I think is a near-universal Christian conviction: no human being can see God, Jesus alone excepted. (Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], xi)
Jn 4:23, 24 was an Iconoclastic locus classicus: “But the hour will come—in fact it is already here—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth—God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit. (Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 11 n. 10)
Of all the early apologists, both Greek and Latins, Minucius (Oct. 32.1-9) gives the fullest, arguably the most artful, and without question the most transparent (Seneca redivivus) version of this topos. First (10.2) he makes his pagan interlocutor (Caecilius) accuse Christians of promoting a superstition that lacked the external marks of traditional religion: “Why do they [the Christians] have no altars, no temples, no pubic images [nota simulacra]?” The question is a rhetorical foil—it gives Caecilius leave to pronounce a much larger indictment. He interprets his own question, which he represents as a matter of fact, to mean that the new superstition is private and clandestine by intention. Why? Because its deluded devotees engage in cult acts that are shameful (9.2, 7: random copulation), deviant (9.4: phallus worship), and even criminal (9.2 and 5: incest and cannibalism). Naturally, it is important for them to maintain secrecy lest they be found out.
Secondary discussions of this well-known passage, especially of Caecilius’ accusation put forward as a question, have been marked by considerable confusion. It is best to restate the obvious: Minucius’ Caecilius is a literary invention, conceived solely for apologetic purposes, and the portrayal of Christianity that Minucius attributes to him is a factoid and a caricature. Lest we forget, Severan Latin Christians who were Minucius’s contemporaries at their agape and eucharistic meals off some kind of material surfaces (probably wooden tables); furthermore, they had access to interior spaces where they worshiped, and at the very least in their funerary hypogea, they had their own images. It is true that they generally avoided pagan nomenclature in describing the tables used in their ritual means and the places where they worshiped: hence, βωμος/ara and νοας/templum intended to denote Christian cult relia are mostly absent from the pages of early patristic literature, although exceptions do occur. As for Christian simulacra, their existence around the year 200 is a simple matter of fact. In short, the anti-Christian accusation that Minucius gives to Caecilius does not square with the real-life condition of Christians living in Minucius’ world.
Minucius makes Octavius respond to Caecilius’ accusation with a litany of Stoic commonplaces. Against the charge that Christianity lacked external forms on purpose (because the new religionists had something to hide), Octavius responds (18.8, 32.4) that Christians believed in a God who is invisible. Of course they had no images (32.1)—God had already created his true simulacrum in the form of the human person (homo). The same is true for temples (32.1) designed to house divinities: how absurd to imagine that humans could contain God within their temples when this very same God had constructed the entire universe (mundus), and even it was too small to contain him (that is, the maker is a posteriori greater than the thing made). Altars and victims are equally superfluous (32.2-3). The best and purest sacrifice (32.2) involves the offering of one’s heart and mind and conscience. Innocence, justice, and care for one’s neighbor: these are the spiritual and ethical sacrifices Christians make.
In short, Octavius does away with cult realia. His concept of cult is essential noncultic. It eliminates the necessity of material props to support worship, including one of the central cult objects within traditional Greek religion, namely the sacred image. The interior disposition of the worshipers is all that counts. God lives (32.7) in the mind and heart of the individual and what matters to God is an honest heart (bonus animus), a pure mind (pura mens), and a clear conscience (sincera sententia). To these interior states Octavius joins (32.3) the typically Stoic ethical concerns for justice, the avoidance of evil, and care for one’s neighbor—in short, a life of virtue. Thus what emerges is an idealized picture of the perfect Christian who has no need for the traditional external appurtenances of cult. (Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 41-42)
Hippolytus adds that the Essences refused to go “into the City” (Jerusalem) because they would have to pass through “the gate” (πυλη), which was adorned with idolatrous images (ανδριαντες): Hippolytus does not specify the subject matter but, given his choice of nomenclature (ανδριαντες instead of αγαλματα), he probably means men (kings, benefactors, politicians), not gods. According to Hippolytus, the Essenes judged that it was against the law (αθεμιστον) to pass “beneath images” (υπο εικονας). Which gate he meant we do not know, but we do know it was a common Roman custom to erect statues and reliefs as city gates. (Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 71) (Refutatio 9.26)
For roughly 170 years (30 to 200) we have no art and no other material evidence marked with distinctively Christian subjects. This probably means that what appears to have been the case actually was: Christians produced nothing materially distinct before the early third century. (Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 131)
Clement [of Alexandria] is the only apologist who applies the Platonic doctrine of representation [μιμησις] within the attack on Greek art. He does so in order to refute the charge of atheism. He acknowledges the basic Platonic division between a higher world of pure cognition (noesis) and a lower world of knowledge based on lines to the phenomenal and material universe. Clement puts artistic representation, which he calls the art of visual representation (the techne of mimesis), at the lower end of the phenomenal world (to aistheta) corresponding to Plato’s realm of shadowy illusions (eikasia, skiai, phantasmata eikones).
For Clement the art of visual representation falls under the rubric of plane: error, falsehood, fraud, deceit. Art is a lie, a deluding and deceiving techne, and in the nonapologetic setting of the Stromateis (6.17.47,3) under his discussion of the Eighth Commandment (Ex 20;15) against theft, he even classifies art as a form of thievery, because the sculptor and the painter steal the truth (aletheia) from God. Using their mimetic skills, they pretend to make animals and planets, but this false and deceptive appropriation is nothing more than robbery. Within the apologetic setting of the Protreptikos Book 4, where Clement attacks Greek art at length, he explicitly equates mimetic techne with plane, which in his Middle platonic system belongs to the lower world of logos doxastikos, or mere opinion. Truth, by contrast, belongs to the upper world, the noetic realm, which Middle Platonists denominated under logos epistemikos, pure or true knowledge.
Clement gives several familiar examples of mimetic error in artistic form: Pygmalion (Prot. 4.57.4) painted in such a lifelike manner that the real animals were deceived (shades of Zeuxis and Apelles); Daedalus’s wooden sculpture of a cow (Prot. 4.57.6), which infatuated and deceived bullish Zeus and caused the disgrace of both the god and his human mate, Pasiphae. Lastly, he gives the example of monkeys (Prot. 4.58.1) too clever to allow themselves to e duped by agalmata and graphai, and then he asks his reader: do you really want to let it be known that you are inferior to an ape? But it is interesting to note that Clement does not follow his apologetic purpose with consistency: at one place he says that art should be praised, in another, he admits the existence of “the form of the beautiful,” and in still another passage he concedes that Lysippus and Apelles had succeeded in enveloping mere matter (υλη) in the “form of godly glory.”
But overall, like Origen, Clement follows the Platonic model, and both Alexandrians deliver a message that is clear and transparently Platonic: mimetic art, especially art purporting to represent divinity, can only reproduce the phenomenal and material world of appearances shadows, illusions, deceptions. Mimesis of this world is necessarily a lie. It distorts the truth, hence it is evil. People who worship techne of this sort become so engrossed in it that it can cause their own ruination: Pygmalion is the classic example, that hapless sculptor who did such a good job of deceptive mimesis that he ended up eternally frustrated, wanting to make love to a piece of stone. Men like Pygmalion only perpetuate the lie—they distort and calumniate the truth. But Christians refuse to be seduced; they recognise artistic mimesis for what it really is and, in doing so, they reveal themselves as the superiors of those pagan fools who worship representational images. In sum, for refusing to submit to the blandishments, the meretricious power of visual mimesis, Christians should not be condemned as atheists but instead commended as sages. (Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 42-43)
Further Reading:
Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons