Discovering God Through the ArtsSample

Art has been part of the Christian heritage from the earliest days. Deep in the catacombs of Rome, early believers left behind images that reflected their faith and their struggles against persecution. It is really a miracle that any early Christian art still exists today, but some has survived the intense persecution of the faith, the ravages of time, and the suspicion of some early church leaders about the appropriateness of representing the sacred in a visual form. In the early days, there were no public places (no church buildings) to display art and, for the first few centuries, scant financial resources in the churches to patronize artists. With all the challenges, art went underground. Literally. Creative believers left behind their pictures in these burial chambers to celebrate the new faith.

As early as 215 AD, the church father Hippolytus allowed new believers to become or remain artists as long as they didn’t make idols. By the time of Gregory the Great (600 AD), a tradition of valuing the arts as a way of communicating truth had become generally accepted, though there would still be a drawn-out iconoclastic controversy, which ultimately had as much to do with political motivations as religious ones. Finally, when the rhetoric cooled and the dust settled, the church came down on the side of embracing the value of images.