There is no historical documentation as to the physical appearance of Jesus. He never sat for a portrait; no identification photo is available for reference. Post-resurrection, he was not recognized; to the disciples on the road to Emmaus he was known only in the breaking of the bread, the inverse of the darkening of intellect our first parents suffered when they ate of the tree. We can see God only to the degree that we can see from within; the risen Christ bears a “new corporeality” (as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger put it in The Spirit of the Liturgy) which demands of our natural faculties that they be, not repressed, but mortified and chastened.
As historical realism comes to the fore in the Renaissance, artistic representations of Christ reflect the devotional life of their era; to that extent, they claim prayer as their source and direction. Over time, the Hellenistic ideal exerts more and greater influence on continental culture. This served, perhaps, as a corrective to certain excesses consequent on distortions in popular devotion, yet only at the grave cost of a certain flattening, a spiritual shallowness; as Ratzinger wrote, “The tragic burden of antiquity has been forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without fear of sin and without the pain of the Cross… True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but such ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred art in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.”
Even the best of merely religious art is doomed to remain didactic and insipid. Sacred art is vivified by the mysticism of its production, its reception, and its integral connection to the liturgy; it holds the power to meditate the invisible through the visible, to lift man to God.
This power was not unknown to the atheist regime of the Soviets. Religious images were suppressed, forbidden by law. Karol Wojtyla led the “Procession of the Frame” through the streets of the communist Nowa Huta, bringing honor by implication to Our Lady of Częstochowa, an image itself scarred and wounded in a Hussite attack on the monastery in which it was housed. Aptly enough for the symbolism at Nowa Huta, the Częstochowa ikon is a Hodegetria, “the one who leads the way.”
Yet here we may go further, to the single source and summit of sacrality in art. Again, Ratzinger:
“The icon of Christ is the center of sacred iconography. The center of the icon of Christ is the Paschal Mystery: Christ is presented as the Crucified, the risen Lord, the One who will come again and who here now hiddenly reigns over all. Every image of Christ must contain these three essential aspects of the mystery of Christ, and, in this sense, must be a image of Easter.”
Could the Soviets have had the spiritual awareness to anticipate and attempt to forestall the veneration of one particular image which St. John Paul II would himself elevate within the life of the universal Church? Of this fully Paschal image, the Polish pope said:
Anyone can come here, look at this Image of the Merciful Jesus, His Heart radiating grace, and hear in the depths of his own soul what Faustina heard: ‘Fear nothing; I am always with you’. And if this person responds with a sincere heart, ‘Jesus, I trust in You,’ he will find comfort in all his anxieties and fears.
It is this image which now crowns the Octave. In the mind and heart of the Church, there is an utmost gravity to these matters, such that “centered as it is on the Paschal Mystery, the image of Christ is always an icon of the Eucharist.”
Thus it is no trivial thing, when, on the very Feast of Divine Mercy, on the day that our current Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, was lashed with unmerited attack from the same source, the world was provided with this alternative:
Even apart from its subject, this blasphemous antithesis of the Paschal Jesus, with its weapons of war, its nationalism, its over-busy tabloid sensationalism, its kitsch, its sinister and alien humanoid figures (one seemingly resembling the Statue of Liberty) levitating beyond the sun, all the lurid particularity which Christian art has always studiously eschewed, its repudiation of any trace of asceticism – witness, in place of wounds, the orbs of light historically linked to all manner of occultisms. From socialist realism to Albert Speer’s Germania sketches, every autocratic regime has demanded sacrificial worship, of image and of real flesh and blood alike – although seldom with such unabashed crassness. More of us would have done well to heed Pope Francis’s warning in Laudato si’: “Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat.” In this moment, we witness the product of a devastated human ecology.
Years before, Cardinal Ratzinger, certainly prescient, had written: “The crisis of art… is a symptom of the crisis of man’s very existence…. and the flood of images that surrounds us really means the end of the image… it manages to produce only what is arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role as creator.” Further, let us recognize and honor his devastating analytical dismissal of the AI generated slop of today that he could hardly even have imagined concretely: “No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity.”
Thankfully, there are no limits to the Divine Mercy; our risen and glorified Lord can forgive even this.
Featured image: Pope Francis venerates the Divine Mercy image in Łagiewniki, Poland, July 30, 2016. © Vatican Media.
Second image: Divine Mercy. Painting in Divine Mercy Sanctuary in Vilnius. By Eugeniusz Kazimirowski – cisza2.krakow.dominikanie.pl, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9049047
Third image: Courtesy Donald Trump’s Truth Social account.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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