Images of God the Father

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Robert1333

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Does anyone know why the Church permits the making of images of God the Father? i.e., on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the famous painting of God creating Adam, God is represented as an old man. There are also many depictions of the Trinity, some by famous renassaince artists, where God sits on a throne as an old man.

I’m no Iconoclast: it seems fine to me to have icons or paintings or statues of Mary, Jesus, angels, or saints. But of God the Father?
 
Why not? God the Father has given us a living image of himself - his son Jesus.

For this reason, if you look at many paintings of the Trinity, Father and Son are shown looking more or less the same, the father being older, grey-haired and more heavily bearded. In fact some Trinity paintings show three young men, all looking identical, to represent the Trinity.
 
God is represented as an old man. There are also many depictions of the Trinity, some by famous renassaince artists, where God sits on a throne as an old man.
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As described in the Book of Daniel.

Doesn’t seem to be a problem to me.
 
I only know of that one picture of God the Father…the sistine chapel…

It is breathtaking I hear…only art that beautifully done would be fitting, and I think that it why I know of only one;)
 
I appreciate both of your responses. But I’m not really convinced.

If the description of the Ancient of Days in Daniel is what justifies depicting God as an old man, then why didn’t Jews do it, before the Incarnation? I think I know why, and it’s because they felt too strongly the prohibition against idol-making, and because they felt that their invisible God was altogether impossible to represent.

And I don’t see why the Incarnation gives us license to paint an image of the Father either. And if it did, would it also permit us to make a statue of God the Father? Say I found an old statue of Zeus–one that was so beautiful it would be a shame to throw out. Could I move it into the Church and put it next to a statue of Jesus and a Dove (the Holy Spirit)? Or like those giant statues of Buddha in parts of Asia, could we make Buddha-like statues of “God the Father” next to similar statues of Jesus?
 
Lillith said:
I only know of that one picture of God the Father…the sistine chapel…

It is breathtaking I hear…only art that beautifully done would be fitting, and I think that it why I know of only one;)
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I loathe the Sistine chapel paintings. I would happily hear they had been blasted to atoms.​

The problem is, that there is no obvious distinction in method or manner or even Divine attributes between a painting of God the Father, & a Renaissance painting of a Classical god such as Zeus or Poseidon.

The paintings on the SC lack all sense of the numinous, ISTM - they could be anybody: figures from Classical myth or history, or Renaissance men (and females) about town. There is no hint of the sacred, let alone the specifically Christian - yet this is meant to be a papal chapel. Pius V was right - in fact, the whole thing should have painted over, not just the nude bits.

The Orthodox have the right idea - they keep to icons. Even a whore can look like a virgin martyr in one of those - but too many Renaissance representations of saints, the BVM, the Blessed Trinity, the individual Divine Persons, end by looking anything but sacred; they too often debase what they depict. Sad 😦

As for depicting the Divine Persons, the Holy Spirit looks like a dove, and nothing more. IMO, it would have been better if the Church had been content to depict them non-figuratively - the Father, by a hand, say, as on a well-known marble tomb from 359 AD at Rome. Besides, depicting God is impossible - it leaves out what is most important theologically - that God is God. The moment He is depicted representationally, He is levelled with every figure with a human face :mad: 😦

Besides, the Church nowhere defined that such pictures were obligatory - only that they were allowable. But the same could be said of wars of defence: that doesn’t mean one wishes to engage in them, only that it is not altogether & always wrong to do so. And so it should (because it could) be with pictures of God. ##
 
Thanks for your reply GottleGeer! I think you know where I’m coming from.

Though, “not altogether & always wrong to do so” – i’m not quite sure about that one yet.
 
Robert1333 said:
Does anyone know why the Church permits the making of images of God the Father? i.e., on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the famous painting of God creating Adam, God is represented as an old man. There are also many depictions of the Trinity, some by famous renassaince artists, where God sits on a throne as an old man.

I’m no Iconoclast: it seems fine to me to have icons or paintings or statues of Mary, Jesus, angels, or saints. But of God the Father?
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The answer is right here:
piar.hu/councils/ecum07.htm
 
I take your point, Robert. Certainly it’s more than difficult to portray God the Father without veering into kitsch and possible irreverence.

I have similar problems to Gottle with some depictions of God the Father, Our Lord, Our Lady and the Saints (anyone seen those tacky cheap plastic statues in the Catholic bookstores - ecch!).

However, the mere existence or possibility of bad depictions doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t be depicted. I have seen too many good examples of such depictions to say this.

There’s a great story of St Faustina agonising over the original of the Divine Mercy image, which was made at her direction. She kept trying to make it truer to the apparitions of Christ on which it was modelled.

Finally Christ himself had to tell her enough was enough - the point of the image was to serve as a symbol and focus for thought and prayer, NOT to be an accurate or aesthetically pleasing depiction of himself.

So with depictions of God the Father - I do find the image of Adam’s creation on the Sistine Ceiling powerful and moving, even if the way it’s depicted is not quite to my taste or that of some others.

The point of images of God the Father is to serve as a focus for prayer and meditation and a reminder of our Heavenly Father. To me the image of an older man is fine. One could argue for the use of the detached bodyparts or old geometric symbols (the circle within the triangle), but there’s something too … impersonal … about using such to depict the first Person of the Trinity.
 
I LOVE the art and paintings in the Sistine Chapel. Absolutlely magnificent! I can’t imagine anyone who could dislike it enough to want it destroyed, but we live in that type of world I guess. I didn’t think you had to be Catholic to love it.

I love the Catholic images of God the Father. Very well represented for our earthly eyes.
 
I dont see how renaissance figures are wrong. If you feel they should be blown to atoms then you must also [technically!] feel the same way about real people too, those figures look like actual ‘real’ people - which is what those biblical characters were - real people!.
I dont like eastern icons, I like some of the colours, but the style is mostly too strange, a bit forced in some cases, and difficult to see them as they really were - as real, three dimensional, living people - enlightened within but most ordinary without. Sort of the reverse of the whitened-tomb analogy.
 
The OT prohibitions were because the Israelites lived surrounded by idolaters. Sacrifice to idols was an everyday part of life. If one were to make an image to represent the LORD, then it wouldn’t be long before that image would be worshipped as God.
 
Robert1333 said:
I’m no Iconoclast: it seems fine to me to have icons or paintings or statues of Mary, Jesus, angels, or saints. But of God the Father?
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This makes no sense to me as Jesus is God, so to question an image depicting God the Father seems irrelevant unless you believe God the Son isn’t God

Ken
 
Doesn’t the catechism talk about the fact that images of God himself were prohibited in the Old Covenant because the invisible God could not be represented. It’s in th section on images.
 
kleary said:
This makes no sense to me as Jesus is God, so to question an image depicting God the Father seems irrelevant unless you believe God the Son isn’t God
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In no way, in saying Jesus can be painted but God can’t, do I mean to deny the full divinity of the Son. Jesus is God, but Jesus is not the Father. That’s just a basic part of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus is God Incarnate, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” (Colossians 1:15), so certainly it is fitting for us to make images of the Image of the invisible God. But the Father of Jesus in heaven has always been “eternal, immortal, INVISIBLE” (1 Tim 1:17). Not only does it seem wrong to me then to make an image of Him, but it is unnecessary, because we can make an image of Jesus, the perfect Image of God.

“The OT prohibitions were because the Israelites lived surrounded by idolaters. Sacrifice to idols was an everyday part of life. If one were to make an image to represent the LORD, then it wouldn’t be long before that image would be worshipped as God.” -kleary

And we don’t live surrounded by idolaters? Now that, thankfully, there aren’t any more of those bad-guys around anymore, we can paint God everywhere!

Isn’t it nice and convenient to be able to look up at the Sistine Chapel and see a little, roly-poly god there, with a cute frowning brow, rather than live with fear and trembling before the Invisible Almighty?

Mystophilus posted a link to the Second Council of Nicaea, which, in response to Iconoclasm, permits veneration of images, but not necessarily of God the Father. “If anyone does not confess that Christ our God can be represented in his humanity, let him be anathema.” (Christ, the anointed one, can be represented, but not his Father, the anointer)
 
As much as Jesus is indeed the image of God and ‘who sees me sees the Father’ and all that, it doesn’t mean that direct substitution is possible.

We cannot just simply portray Christ creating the light and darkness, the world, the animals and Man, speaking with Moses on Sinai … we need a separate image of some kind of God the Father for those things. And both in Eastern and Western Christianity that image has by far mostly been of a human-like being, since we alone of all creatures have been described as being made in his image.

And yet obviously it is far from forbidden to make images of him, as various pictorial (including human) representations of the Father were made well before the Renaissance as well as afterwards. Presumably they existed both before and after the Council to which you refer as well. A human image may not be the perfect representation of course, but we, being visual creatures, do at times both need and benefit from having images of the Father around. What image would you suggest that we use for such situations, and in what way would your choice be better than a humanoid one.

Now I haven’t yet seen an image of God the Father that I would in any way call ‘cute’. Perhaps that’s just because almost all of the older men I’ve come into contact with have indeed been stern and somewhat scary authority figures, possibly I just transfer that onto images of God the Father as well.
 
Robert1333 said:
In no way, in saying Jesus can be painted but God can’t, do I mean to deny the full divinity of the Son. Jesus is God, but Jesus is not the Father. That’s just a basic part of the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus is God Incarnate, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” (Colossians 1:15), so certainly it is fitting for us to make images of the Image of the invisible God. But the Father of Jesus in heaven has always been “eternal, immortal, INVISIBLE” (1 Tim 1:17). Not only does it seem wrong to me then to make an image of Him, but it is unnecessary, because we can make an image of Jesus, the perfect Image of God… Mystophilus posted a link to the Second Council of Nicaea, which, in response to Iconoclasm, permits veneration of images, but not necessarily of God the Father.
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Oops! :o
I posted that link to Nicaea II because I mistakenly thought that it included the line which covered this idea.

The theory ran that, because humans are created in the image of God, and because Jesus has already come as the image of God, images of God have been presented, and so it is permissible to make images of God, so long as one understands that the image is never the real thing, but merely a sign for it. I am still trying to find the source of that…
 
My apologies: it was not the Council that I should have linked to, it was John of Damascus, who was one of the major influences upon the Council.
Holy Scripture clothes in figure God and the angels, and the same holy man (Blessed Denis) explains why. When sensible things sufficiently render what is beyond sense, and give a form to what is intangible, a medium would be reckoned imperfect according to our standard, if it did not fully represent material vision, or if it required effort of mind. If, therefore, Holy Scripture, providing for our need, ever putting before us what is intangible, clothes it in flesh, does it not make an image of what is thus invested with our nature, and brought to the level of our desires, yet invisible? A certain conception through the senses thus takes place in the brain, which was not there before, and is transmitted to the judicial faculty, and added to the mental store… I gaze upon the image of God, as Jacob did, (Gen. 32.30) though in a different way. [etc]
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While he does focus primarily on images of Jesus as the image of God, his constant reiteration of the complete divinity of Jesus effectively collapses a discrimination between images of Jesus and images of God. His only objection to images of the Father being the practical impossibility of representing infinity.
 
Mystophilus said:
My apologies: it was not the Council that I should have linked to, it was John of Damascus, who was one of the major influences upon the Council.

While he does focus primarily on images of Jesus as the image of God, his constant reiteration of the complete divinity of Jesus effectively collapses a discrimination between images of Jesus and images of God. His only objection to images of the Father being the practical impossibility of representing infinity.
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:tiphat: so it’s only a practical issue, as I suspected, and not some moral objection to depictions of God the Father.
 
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