Carey Senior Faculty Fellow 2001-02
Karl Morrison (History)
Rutgers University
Know Thyself: Christian Art and
Spirituality in the West
The axiom, "know thyself," was part of the classical
tradition that had an immense impact, and a still continuing incarnation,
in Christianity. My research began as an archeological project.
I intended to dig exploratory trenches at critical moments in the
history of Western Civilization to see how people made sense of
those two words, "Know thyself." Clearly, some of the
possible Christian senses would be radically different from pagan
antecedents, so different as to make self-knowing a completely different
project from any conceivable in Antiquity. I planned to use this
exploration as a test of the difference Christianity made in the
understanding of human nature.
I soon realized that the venture of self-knowing required tools,
tools of analysis, reflection, controversy. From the beginning of
the venture, probably in archaic Greece, people who practiced it
capitalized on the fact that we can't see our own faces. To know
what we look like--what we are, at least in our individuating faces--we
have to look into some reflective medium, a mirror, for example,
or the reactions of other people, their facial expressions and gestures,
or drama. Hamlet was saying nothing new when he proposed to "catch
the conscience of the King" in his little play. This is how
I decided to explore Christian religious art as a medium of self-knowing.
Christian art had a beginning, around 200 C.E. I am prepared to
argue that, as a devotional medium for the community, it also had
an end, sometime during the turn from Baroque to Roccoco. Naturally,
ecclesiastical art has continued, but I think that devotional art
survives in countless personal turns, and especially in what is
derided as Kitsch. When the Council of Trent turned aside from the
novel and the unfamiliar, it cut institutional religion off from
the development of art as a field of exploration. The results have
been lamented and struggled against by many movements aiming to
revive Christian art from the nineteenth century to the present.
To sum up: My project is to explore the career of Christian art
as a tool of self-knowing, and to consider some reasons for its
appearance, late in the history of the primitive Church, and for
its disappearance in the age of Descartes. From the beginning, of
course, self-knowing was one of a two-pronged venture. The other
prong was knowing God. One reason for the appearance I mentioned
may well be that anthropology was accepted (up to a point) as casting
some light on theology. One reason for the disappearance may well
be that points of intersection earlier alleged between anthropology
and theology were discredited.
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