The Pro-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The way to correct an "art" (as oppose to icon) centered account of the history of images is not to denigrate the Renaissance, but to show how the icon pervaded it.  To give one of many examples of this scholarly strategy, here's Christian Kleinbub on Raphael:

Raphael's Transfiguration... does lead the viewer on a spiritual journey. The painting explicitly addresses the three varieties of vision that arise repeatedly in discussions of the contemplation of God.  The lower zone of the composition shows the struggle of external (corporeal) and internal (imaginary) vision in the confrontation of the apostles and the possessed boy's party, while the Tabor scene above shows the historical and imaginary vision of Christ himself, who satisfied the internal vision of the apostles below and also points beyond it....   Light falls on Christ's face from beyond the frame: it is the divine light of intellectual vision, the luce etterna of the Godhead...

Raphael's Transfiguration... in its sense of stillness, symmetrical setting, and iconic aspect, may well refer to traditional iconic images. The Renaissance viewer might even have assumed that the prominence of Christ's face carried a meaning like those more traditional works, referring like a symbol to the vision of the invisible God...

This devotional aspiration of Raphael's Transfiguration is remarkable in an age in which altarpieces were shedding some of the outward trappings of their more contemplative functions. Iconic altarpieces - where devotion of the kind described by [Nicholas of] Cusa might be centered and anticipated by static hierarchical forms - were being replaced by altarpieces that mainly depicted istoria comprising energetic narrative scenes.  Raphael, in fact, was one of the leaders of this movement, creating one of the first fully historiated altarpieces of the Renaissance in his Entombment...

But between Raphael's Transfiguration and almost all other Renaissance religious images lies an important difference, for Raphael's altarpiece does not simply invite but also describes the process by which the  mind is turned to internal vision of God.  Directly engaging the problem of how the icon can be used spiritually, it deploys its actors so that they do not merely play out their narrational roles but also enact  or figure  the very activity of contemplation in gestural terms...  The Transfiguration harmonized both narrative and iconic aspects of contemporary altarpieces, offering the marriage of the istoria, and all that the istoria stood for, to the spiritual function of the altarpiece through an unprecedented thematization of the stages of contemplative seeing.

That from Kleinbub's book Vision and the Visionary. The upshot is that the very thing the Pre-Raphaelites were looking for could be found...  in Raphael.

Architecture as Theology

I take the scholarship of Margaret Barker with a hefty grain of salt. But the freshness in passages like this is undeniable:

The Mosaic tabernacle, and all the temples later built in Jerusalem, represented the creation, divided by a veil into the visible and invisible worlds.  The holy of holies, with the golden chariot throne, was the invisible world of God and the angels.  It was the state of uncreated light.  The veil, woven from four colours to represent the four elements, thus represented matter screening the glory of God from the material world.  The holy of holies was beyond matter, and therefore beyond time, a hidden place, often called eternity.  The great hall of the temple represented the material world, and was the garden of Eden, paradise, with Adam, the human being, as the high priest.  Rituals in the holy of holies were rituals in eternity, and those who entered the holy of holies passed between heaven and earth.  The priests were angels; the high priest was the Lord.

I often point out to my students that the Bible begins (Babel) and ends (New Jerusalem) with architectural criticism.  Barker reminds us that the Bible is centered on architecture as well.  The Bible's extended architectural descriptions are not sidelines.  They are part of the revelation on Sinai, and are properly theological.  To study architecture is therefore to study theology - something that many (most?) architectural historians and theologians are conditioned to overlook.

Freud was Right

R.R. Reno in the current First Things: 

It seems not to have occurred to Freud that his wish to live without illusions may have been so powerful as to have clouded his reason and infected his arguments about wish fulfillment. After all, his strong desire to live without illusions will, according to his own theory, have the effect of conjuring illusions—illusions of illusions, if you will—that provide him with something to debunk and unmask.

The tendency of the New Atheists to conjure caricatures of Christianity that they can destroy with their arguments suggests that the same dynamic of wish fulfillment holds for them as well. And not just for them. Our postmodern [perhaps better: supermodern] professoriate manages to find racism, patriarchy, and oppression everywhere. They do so with such sure ease that I find myself wondering if they are in the end, as Freud warns, using the rhetoric of critical thinking to support their illusions—illusions in this case arising from an intense wish to be critically and morally superior.