Many an undergraduate lecture hall still furnishes a home for the Icoelacanth of medieval studies—hat is, for the historian who shows slides of medieval images as mere illustrations of daily life, or as nothing more than a graphic adjunct to the words of medieval sources. In an episode of habitat encroachment that none need lament, this collection of Herbert Kessler’s recent essays makes life more difficult for the living fossil. Again and again the author shows how early medieval images from Byzantium and the West “reveal[ed] truth in sensual beauty” (205), expressed arguments, and embodied “complex theological interpretations” (201) in ways that words did not. Experts will not find it surprising that the producers of images often went beyond the theories of art and beauty developed by medieval authors. But Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art has important implications for the history of medieval culture broadly construed. For this reason it may be of interest to have the response of one whose specialty is the Christian culture of the early and high Middle Ages rather than art history.

A central point is that images were often intended to remind viewers of the fundamental Christian paradox of God’s simultaneous presence in and absence from the world. By interpolating icons into narrative pictures, image-makers indicated not only the incarnate Lord’s visible action in time, but also signaled the limitation of carnal vision and the need to seek some kind of higher, spiritual perception. God disclosed to the ancient Jews his providential order for history; what they saw in shadow and figure, the incarnation presented as open truth and fulfillment to the Christians. But the divine essence remains ever greater than the human capacity to perceive or comprehend while on earth. In other words, just as the theologian knew that the eschatological proviso “not yet” must accompany every earthly affirmation of “already,” the image-maker believed that carnal vision of the holy in this life must be subsumed in supersensory, spiritual beholding, which could only be complete in the next.

Kessler adverts repeatedly to the danger of idolatry. Image-makers and authors were aware of the possibility of investing images with the sacral character of the holy persons depicted in them. Some polemicists, such as Claudius of Turin, Agobard of Lyons, and the author of the Libri Carolini, insisted that even a mild form of veneration was a slippery slope leading to image worship. Their résumé of proof-texts included the Mosaic prohibition of images expressed in the Second Commandment and in more oblique terms elsewhere. Offsetting the weight of such strictures, however, was the entrance of the God Man into history, which entailed that Christ could be depicted. Even more important, Kessler argues, was the persistent need to distinguish between the Christian spiritual understanding of the Bible and what was taken to be the narrow literalism of Jewish exegesis. “The incarnation made images possible, but this desire to disengage Christianity from Jewish literalism made them necessary” (52).

In Chapter 4, Kessler considers icons of the Holy Face of Jesus as material configurations of the transcendent divine archetype. The wider topic here is the status of graphic reproduction of all sorts. While some ancient authors held that the act of drawing an outline was the decisive moment of image production, others maintained that the sketch was imperfect on its own and had to be completed by the application of pigments. Defenders of images recalled such distinctions to show how an image could be both an artist’s production and a true imprint of the invisible divine prototype. Just as a seal may be impressed in various materials, the transcendent form of the holy person becomes visible through rather than in the material in which it is depicted. Images not made by human hands, such as the handkerchief with the image of Christ of Edessa, constitute a special category of relic-images. Their miraculous origin showed that unlike pagan idols, Christian images had real, though invisible, archetypes. Indeed, as an “amalgam of image and physical matter, the icon [of the Holy Face of Edessa] recapitulated the miraculous wedding of spirit and flesh in Christ” (75). But relic-images furnished only a limited kind of support to the defenders of icons, because in the case of the latter it was always necessary to differentiate between the holy likeness of the image and the matter shaped by the artist.

In the book’s most provocative chapters (6 and 7), Kessler gives an account of the ways in which images were intended to span the gap between this world and the next, matter and spirit, temporal and eternal. These pages will reward readers interested in the history of medieval assumptions about sight, psychology, and images.

In Chapter 6, “Real Absence: Early Medieval Art and the Metamorphosis of Vision,” the author adds important qualification to an observation of Peter Brown about the changing status of images in late antiquity. While Brown focused on changes in what was depicted in images (late antique representations of this world transformed and early medieval images that acted as windows onto an entirely different world), Kessler shows how those changing depictions reflect a transformation in the way people saw. Imagery’s defenders in the West maintained that it—although essentially material itself—not only engages the eye of the body, but may also encourages spiritual vision. Statements by, or later attributed to, Pope Gregory I suggested that affective viewer response to certain images could help raise the mind from the merely sensory to the supersensory perception that St. Augustine had called intellectual vision. Although the material image, rather than the truth, arouses love, the experience of love may be sufficiently arresting to draw the viewer’s mind upward to contemplate the divine author of beauty and goodness. Kessler even points to an analogy between images and the incarnation, at least in the sense that both effected a “spiritual transit” by using matter to lead carnal human beings to the realm of spiritual truth. The author does not pursue the implications of this line of thought for Christology or doctrines of the Eucharist, though these would be avenues worth exploring. Thus the words “real absence” of the chapter’s title refer to images that are vivid enough to elicit an affective viewer response, but are also visibly bracketed in order to remind the viewer to seek a supersensory mode of contemplation. The ideas Kessler does track coalesce into a more or less unified doctrine of art’s spiritual function during the eighth century, largely in response to iconoclasm and its echoes in the West. In other words, this metamorphosis of vision was completed well after the terminus Brown situated, which “differentiated Western image theory absolutely from Byzantine notions that the icon was transparent, a window onto the higher reality” (124). “If the sacred image in the West was a bridge, then it was a drawbridge drawn up, if a window, then only with a shade pulled down. It marked the existence of the ‘world out there,’ but it also revealed its own inability to transport the faithful into that world” (144).

Kessler argues in Chapter 7 that Carolingian art was itself a mode of spiritual seeing, a thesis that conflicts with some of the ideas expressed in Carolingian textual sources. Forceful voices such as the author of the Libri Carolini asserted that, since they can only represent past events, images cannot rise above the physical. Such critics could refer to St. Augustine’s authority to argue that, confined as images are to the realm of appearances, they are no substitute for words, which require interpretation and may stimulate contemplation. Against this minimalist view of art, Kessler cites a number of patristic and early medieval authors who “advanced art to convey typological and eschatological messages” (151). But his main source of evidence is the practice of image-makers themselves, which was densely interpretative. Kessler here takes a crucial step beyond even the finest early medieval historians, whose approach to images is markedly less nuanced and more text-driven than his. Images could recall objects, actions, and events of the past and at the same time interpret them. Because of their allusive and ambiguous character, images could give more forceful expression than words to some kinds of thinking about Scripture’s polyvalent figures. His reminder that theologians expected all intermediaries, whether verbal or graphic, to fall away in the heavenly face-to-face encounter with God reinforces Kessler’s point: both words and images had a strictly provisional worth. But this observation needs to be placed alongside statements by John Scotus Eriugena, Remigius of Auxerre, and others, affirming (with greater enthusiasm than most patristic authors had) the lasting value of the liberal arts as instruments of salvation, and even presenting them as immanent and innate features of the human mind. It is not clear that Kessler is aware of these statements or the difficulty they present to his thesis.

Such reservations aside, however, this is an exceptionally fine group of essays. Medievalists of all fields, not only art historians, will be grateful to find them collected in this convenient and affordable format.