I posted the following as a comment to Chas Clifton's post on Early Christians' attacks on Pagan art:
Dear Chas,
Just a note on the Abrahamic religions' hostility to art: its worth noting that traditional Christianity stands out as the one member of this group in which such a priori hostility is emphatically not present. It took a seventh Ecumenical Council and well over a century of nasty conflict with the Iconoclast heretics to decide the subject. Eastern Orthodox teaching maintains that to deny the possibility of representing spiritual truth in material symbols is to miss out on the full import of Christ's Incarnation. God took on a material body so that we who are also formed of matter may know Him and be united with Him. Renowned Iconodule St. John of Damascus wrote: "I do not worship matter but I worship the creator of matter, who for my sake became material and deigned to dwell in matter... I will not cease from worshipping the matter through which my salvation has been effected." That's why Orthodox churches are full to the gills of paintings, and it's why we use material things-- bread, wine, oil, water, wedding rings, crowns-- in our sacraments. They're not just symbols, but rather matter deified through the Creator's presence within His creation.
It's a joyous and celebratory theology which the Western churches have unfortunately been missing out on for quite a while now; many sects took it a very sad extreme, e.g. the Calvinist iconoclasts destroying Christian art in Scotland. Archbishop Kallistos Ware explains it thus:
"[The Iconoclasts] fell, as so many puritans have done, into a kind of dualism. regarding matter as a defilement, they wanted a religion freed from all contact with what is material; for they thought that what is spiritual must be non-material. But that is to betray the Incarnation, by allowing no place to Christ's humanity, to His body; it is to forget that our body as well as our soul must be saved and transfigured."We're not dualists, however much most Christians have neglected and forgotten the point. C.S. Lewis remembered, though. I love his blunt and to the point remark: "God likes matter. He made quite a lot of it."
Update: It's an interesting side note that the Roman Catholic church held on to sculpture as a religious art form, while the Orthodox almost completely abandoned it. What might be at stake here theologically, I have no idea. But Catholic art since the Renaissance (much of which, let me hasten to add, I love) definitely embraced a more Pagan aesthetic, while Orthodox icons maintained their otherworldly and non-representational style.
