Beyond the Material: Toward a Proper Understanding and Engagement with the Material in Christianity

Upon entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the pilgrim is met by the Stone of Anointing—a limestone slab set in place in 1810, seventeen centuries after the anointing it commemorates. What place does this stone occupy, and what place should it? This article argues that modern discomfort with material veneration originates not in the practice but in a philosophical inheritance that severed the material from the transcendent, and that a properly catechized understanding of the icon dissolves the charge of idolatry.

I trace a thread from Plato’s realms and Forms, through the Aristotelian renaissance of Medieval Scholasticism, to the Nominalist turn of Roscelin of Compiègne and William of Ockham, by which the Universals were denied and creation ceased to point beyond itself. Coupled with the Enlightenment insistence upon the empirically verifiable, this turn produced the desacralized man Eliade describes—a condition shared, I contend, by many modern Christians of Protestant heritage.

Against this background I examine iconoclasm, Byzantine and Reformation alike, and defend the icon on three grounds: as scripturally valid, as book for the unlearned, and as window to the transcendent. Drawing on John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, and the Christological settlement of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, I argue that the icon is neither consubstantial with nor identical to its prototype; the representation is something different from that which is represented, and veneration passes through the material to the person beyond it.

The kiss is given not to the object, but to the face it bears. Christianity is material through and through.