Restoring a 1912 Church: Oil Paintings, the Father, and the Lamb
One of the parishes of a large European capital, a 1912 building returned to the diocese after forty years as a warehouse, is being restored. The renovation committee - a museum curator, a private banker, and the senior churchwarden - brings three proposals to the rector. First, a donor will hang in the nave a large oil painting, 'Christ at the Door', an academic realist work in the manner of late nineteenth-century salon religious art. Second, the north porch mosaic is to show a white-bearded old man wearing a triangular halo and inscribed 'The Father'. Third, the sanctuary doors are to be painted with a lamb carrying a cross-banner and a wound in its breast, 'as in the catacombs', because the iconographer's sketch of the human figure has been rejected as 'too Byzantine'. The banker also mentions that a sculptor he knows will donate a life-size white marble figure of Christ for the garden. The rector must answer the committee in writing before the next sitting of the diocesan art commission.
1. Assess the three proposals, distinguishing what is doctrinally excluded from what is a matter of style or episcopal permission.
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Sanctuary doors - the lamb. Canon 82 of the Council in Trullo is directly on point: it forbids the use of the ancient type of the lamb in the sacred images and orders that the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, Christ our God, be shown henceforth in human form. The canon does not abolish the symbol; it forbids stopping at the type after the antitype has come. So the answer is not 'too Byzantine' but 'the canonical norm': the human figure is required here. A lamb may remain as a subordinate symbol - on a vessel, a cloth, a door-knocker - not as the image of Christ over the sanctuary.
North porch - 'The Father'. This cannot be installed. The reason is dogmatic: 'No one has seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son... has declared him' (Jn 1:18). The Father is not incarnate and cannot be portrayed as an old man. The 'Ancient of Days' of Daniel 7, which the East does permit, is read by the Fathers as the pre-eternal Son, and must carry the cross-halo and the inscribed name of Christ so that the identification is unambiguous. An image labelled 'The Father' must not go up; the Great Council of Moscow of 1667 restricted precisely this class of image.
The oil painting. Here the committee has a point: no canon makes oil paint illegal, and the tradition includes many styles. The real questions are whether it carries the inscription of the name and the canonical attributes, whether it presents Christ as a portrait of a man or as the transfigured Lord, and whether its manner serves prayer or invites a naturalistic, psychological reading. That is for the diocesan art commission, not the rector alone, and no answer should forbid what the tradition permits.
2. How do you decline the marble statue without humiliating the donor or teaching the parish a false lesson?
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Give the dogmatic principle, not a taste verdict. The Seventh Ecumenical Council distinguished the veneration of the image from the worship due to God alone, and defended the veneration of images in the Church's tradition. The East has not used three-dimensional figures for veneration - not because sculpture is idolatrous (that charge was answered in the eighth and ninth centuries), but because the received manner of depicting and venerating the Incarnate Word is the painted or mosaic image. A life-size statue in a garden would not in fact be venerated; but it would teach the parish the wrong answer to the question 'what is an icon?'
Keep the donor. Offer the sculptor a commission that fits: a stone cross, a carved or mosaic panel for the garden or the porch. Same money, same generosity honoured, no scandal. If he insists on the figure, decline and thank him - and do not let a gift settle the parish's theology by fait accompli.
Say who decides. Anything permanently visible, especially on the exterior, goes to the bishop before acceptance. The rector should not be the only signature on it, and the committee should hear that from the rector himself.
Pastorally: the banker's offer was a kindness. A parish that answers kindness with a lecture will get no more kindness. Answer it with a better commission.
3. The committee complains that the rector is 'imposing Byzantine taste'. How do you answer, and what do you ask of the committee and of the bishop?
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Separate three languages the committee is fusing:
- Dogmatic limits - what may not be depicted: the Father as an old man; the Lamb in place of Christ in human form; anything that divides the Person or confuses the natures.
- Canonical and disciplinary rules - what requires the bishop's blessing: new images in the church, and above all on the sanctuary and the exterior.
- Style and quality - a real and important matter, but one on which the tradition is broad: Greek, Russian, Serbian, Coptic and the twentieth-century renewal all differ. The rector has no right to impose his taste as dogma; equally, 'too Byzantine' is a taste objection and should be answered as one.
Of the committee ask: a written inventory with photographs and exact positions, so the art commission sees what is proposed and where; a statement of who pays and who owns each work; and acceptance that the bishop's decision is final in the first two categories.
Of the bishop ask: a visitation or a written blessing; the art commission's ruling on the oil painting; and, if the parish can afford it, the appointment of an iconographer who will revise the rejected sketches with the committee rather than simply overrule them. Most 'style wars' in parishes are really arguments about who is heard.