Jesus Christ Pantocrator

1200 words, 6 minute read

I dare you, in fact I double dog dare you: Take the AT challenge. Maintain eye contact with the Pantocrator (above) for one full minute? Couldn’t do it? Didn’t think so. I’m not surprised. I haven’t been able to do it either. I’m working my way up…but I’m still well short of 60 seconds, well short.

You can practice. Find a pre-school child. Please don’t abduct her! Lock eyes instead. Same experience, but some folks find a baby less threatening than the Creator of Heaven and Earth; some don’t. 

Call it education, acculturation or just plain growing-up: we are practiced in the art of putting on masks to protect ourselves from the penetrating gaze of others. Maybe you let a significant other cross your mote…on occasion (or maybe not); but otherwise, your defenses are impregnable…to everyone, that is, except the Pantocrator…or any rando baby carelessly left by her ‘weekend warrior’ dad in his overstuffed supermarket shopping cart.

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Post-classical Western art (painting) sorts itself, very roughly, into 3 major periods:

1. Byzantine/Gothic: God sees into our hearts (icons) and/or we view the world through God’s eyes. Either way, God is the implied subject of every proposition. 

2. Renaissance: God gets the hook - exit stage right. From DaVinci (1500) to Manet (1860), we paint the world as we see it, through our eyes. Now I am the subject of every proposition. I have even arranged the objects on the canvas so that I am now the focus (perspective). Either God doesn’t exist, or he is irrelevant, or he has abandoned us, or he’s dead. 

Who needs God anyway? I am the captain of my ship, the arbiter of my truth, warden of the cosmos, judge of my fellow human beings. I am all three branches of government conflated in a singularity. 

Thanks to Galileo, the Earth is no longer the center of the universe but, spoiler alert, neither is the Sun. I am the center of the Universe, my universe at least, and that’s all need matter (to me)…right? And there’s absolutely no one to tell me otherwise: no parent, no priest, no professor, no pope. 

“Look here God. I am rebuilding the Tower of Babel…a million times over, all across the Globe. What are you going to do about it? Wipe us out with a plague of locusts? We’ll shoot ‘em down before they can sting us! Technology, God, not Miracles! Gnosis, Lord, not Mystery!

“We don’t need you, God, and as a matter of fact, we don’t need art either, except as decoration to break up the relentlessly repeating pattern of our wallpaper. ‘Get that Rembrandt out of here; it doesn’t go with the furniture. If only that imbecile had used blue instead of green! Oh well, his loss; he won’t be gracing my walls anytime soon.’ Now dogs playing poker – that entertains me.” 

Flash: If you’re so anxious to see the world through your own eyes, why don’t I just invent a camera? And so the mask of Renaissance is removed revealing the culprit’s real identity, Enlightenment!

3. Modern. Beginning c. 1870 with the first Impressionists and then exploding into a cornucopia of Constructivist styles (including Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction), so-called modern art has turned the world inside out…again.

Once more, we see the World (and ourselves) as God sees it (or excuse me, as a transcendent entity would see it if such an entity existed). Our artists are looking beneath the phenomenal surface and showing us the noumenal world below. Cubism is the new iconography. Leger is the new Giotto, etc.

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We are used to looking at paintings. Sometimes the experience is exhilarating; but be honest, often it’s tedious. Sometimes it reveals something new and unexpected about the World and our presence in it; sometimes it’s just ‘same old/same old’.

We are less used to paintings looking at us. For the most part, it’s icons that have that quality. And yes, it’s unsettling…in the extreme: “U lookin’ at me?” 

Well, I don’t like it…I am very happy being anonymous. Like Adam, I am anxious to hide from God…and from Eve (fig leaf in hand).  

Next to the Madonna, Christ – The Creator of All (Pantocrator) is perhaps the most painted theme in all of Western art. The first such image still extant (above), was painted in the Sinai desert during the 6th century CE, not long after the sack of Rome.

 It is a fitting symbol (as well as vehicle) for the integration of Christianity into various cultural media (including art). The Sinai iconographer captured something absolutely vital about the human experience: We are more seen than seer! More object than subject.

Modern Western Civilization is characterized by its flatness: the cosmos is flat, time is linear, cause precedes effect, “things fall apart” (entropy). (GM Hopkins) We have evolved an entire language family (Modern Indo-European) to encode this vision: subject – verb (active) – object. 

Such a view would have been incomprehensible to early Christians. They understood that the life of Jesus (Incarnation – Ascension) forever changed the topology of Being. Effectively, it turned the world inside out. The whole (God) becomes a quantum part (one person) of that whole. The fundamental topology of Being is circular (or spiroid), not linear (or flat).  

We are not the subject of Being; God is. Art is not about what we see – we have ourselves for that. Art is about what God sees – Beauty, Truth, Justice – in the world…and in us. We need art to show us the world and we need icons specifically to show us ourselves. 

Now, go back to the Pantocrator. Take the AT Challenge and let me know if you can do it.