new church life: march/april 2016
program he is leading for the Swedenborg Foundation. His weekly YouTube
videos, “Off the Left Eye,” are amazingly effective in spreading knowledge of
Swedenborg and his teachings throughout the world.
Dr. Martha Gyllenhaal: Art and History
Throughout history, art and religion have gone hand in hand, leaving a
series of images that reflect how people view God and relate to Him. The earliest
images of Christ consistently depict him as a young (beardless) shepherd
holding and feeding His flock. But in 325, just 12 years after he officially
established Christianity, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea which
questioned the nature of Christ and His relation to God the Father.
Images of Christ then began to take on a variety of forms. Orthodox
Christians who saw Him as co-ruler with God the Father depicted Him on
a throne while Arians, who believed He was not divine, depicted Him as
vulnerable and much less regal. (Not surprising, emperors preferred to use the
former type of image in the churches they commissioned!) Martha showed
examples of these changing images of Christ from Ravenna, Italy, where
churches, mausoleums and baptisteries are covered with mosaics depicting
Christ in a variety of ways.
Throughout Europe, Christianity followed the expanding Roman Empire
but when the empire contracted, people on the periphery were left without the
protection of Roman law and Christian culture. In this pagan environment
Irish monks protected their sacred manuscripts from destruction and
profanation, not only by hiding them from marauding Vikings, but by writing
them in a type of hard-to-decipher Christian shorthand. Yet, the exquisite
interlace designs on pagan metalwork impressed these scribes and they
adapted them to produce spectacular
embellishments in their manuscripts.
The Chi Rho page (Christ’s name) in
the Book of Kells, now in Dublin, is an
exquisite example of their labors.
In her second session Martha
showed how the Catholic Church
convened the Council of Trent in
an effort to counter the inroads of
Protestantism. They made sweeping
internal reforms, completely shifting
the function of art from teaching
people, to persuading them. Gone
was the traditional, classic art of the
Renaissance, replaced with the much
(Martha) has been
involved in New Church
education for 39 years
and says the last four
in the College have
been the most exciting
– so much so that she
never wants to retire.
136