OLD TESTAMENT & ART: Art and theology converge to bring the Old Testament’s stories to life.
Join us for the next year as we make our way through the Old Testament. Despite the Second Vatican Council’s promotion of Scripture reading, many Catholics are still not as familiar with the Bible as they should be. That is likely doubly true when it comes to the Old Testament. In this series, we’ll focus on key events and persons in the Old Testament, discussing what they meant in their day and their further application in light of the New Testament. We’ll also see how those events (and their theology) were captured by our larger culture through examining a classical piece of art that illustrates the passage we are considering. Your questions and comments are always welcome in the comments section.
Creation (Genesis 1)
Even secular people generally know something of the accounts of creation in Genesis 1-2. Whenever people hear the phrase, “In the beginning,” most instinctively revert to the first pages of the Bible.
Yet the accounts of creation are often misunderstood. Some people would dismiss them, claiming “science” or, specifically, “evolution” has disproven them. Others seem to adopt a defensive posture, insisting we need to take Genesis 1 literally. Each extreme generally alienates the other.
Catholics, however, are not bound to either. The Church teaches that when we read a biblical text, we also have to take into account what kind of genre, or type of writing it is, because that genre qualifies how the truth the text offers is being taught. This is not an evasion of hard issues or a diluting of Scripture. People regularly adapt how they read something in light of the genre it’s written in. You can read a police report of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (“just the facts, ma’am”), a historian’s account (the facts plus interpretation), or Jim Bishop’s The Day Lincoln Was Shot (a historical novel based on facts and interpretations but also adapted to make the story interest readers). The same event underlies all three, but all three read differently — and should be read differently — based on what kind of writing we’re reading. The same is true of the Bible.
The Bible is a religious book. It is interested in the fact that God created, not how he did it. Genesis has a theological message; it is not the recommended textbook for Biology 101.
That means we need not take Genesis literally. But it also means that “science” and “evolution” have to stay in their lanes. Science might try to explain how life developed, but whether or not God created (be it immediately or through a chain of causal events he initiated) is beyond science’s ability to answer. At worst, it is a question for philosophy, i.e., reason unaided by God’s Revelation.
To say there are questions science cannot answer (as opposed to hasn’t yet answered) is not an a priori copout. I hope every reader has at one time experienced being loved. Well, can you put that love under a microscope? See it in a telescope? Is there some reagent you can add, like cobalt thiocyanate to cocaine, that changes color in its presence? No. But does that mean love isn’t real?
Shakespeare captured it well: “There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy” [Hamlet, 1.5.165-66]. Or your science.
Genesis teaches a few salient facts, starting with its first words: “beginning.” That is an enormous change of perspective that comes from the Judaeo-Christian tradition: there is a beginning. The universe is neither eternal nor a self-subsisting mystery. If you compare Israel with all its neighboring peoples, that’s evident. For them, as for the Greeks, the “gods” simply appear somewhere along in the process, but the universe exists before and after them. And there is no attempt to try and explain it. It’s almost as if the universe is some mysterious being that, in contrast to everything within it, has no beginning, no purpose, no intelligibility, and no discernible goal.
Genesis intends to teach a few theological facts, starting with the fact that everything comes from God. Beyond them, questions of “how” — how God created, for example — are things he left to you to use the mind he gave you, which is one of the ways you are made in his “image and likeness.”
Our first piece of art is a mosaic from 12th-century Sicily, found in Palermo’s Cappella Palatina, part of the Palace of the Normans. Western Christians might think it looks Eastern, Byzantine, and they would not be wrong: Sicily was one of those places where East and West met. The tesserae (the pieces of tile used to produce mosaics) are sufficiently large here to see what detailed work this is.
I chose this illustration because it captures our overall idea (even though it actually illustrates the third day of creation). God stands outside of creation: the gold zone is the eternity of God. It is larger than everything created, found within the blue and white orbs. It is clear the latter depends on God: it is the hand of God that enlivens it. The two colors within the orbs — blue (water and the sky) and white (land) — represent the fundamental features of creation. The “big deals” of creation — the sun, moon and stars — are prominently featured. Perhaps for people of an earlier time, especially when they imagined a geocentric universe, that universe might have been thought of as a bit smaller. But for us, stars representing distant galaxies, their presence in this painting makes even stronger the point: it all depends on God. God holds a scroll in his hand, a nice allusion to Revelation 6:14, where the heavens are presented as in scroll in the Divine Hand.
I note that the sun, moon and stars are created on day four in Genesis 1 because, while I have used this work to illustrate the creation of a universe by a God who is apart from his creation, it is one of the several depictions of the days of creation found in the Cappella Palatina. For other examples, see here and here.
