Jesus Christ - The forge of vision : a visual history of modern Christianity

In the 1559 Latin edition of his monumental Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin excoriated humanitys inclination to substitute its conceptions of deity for the true God. Human ingenuity, he said, was a perpetual forge of idols (idolorum fabricam). The phrase recalls the biblical tradition of denouncing the production of idols from wood and metal. Whatever else one may think of it, Calvins critique of the imagination or the visual operation of cognition surely gets one thing right: human beings manufacture their worlds with the images they craft. Even if they are not worshipped, images exert powerful effects over those who use them. We believe them, cherish them, hoard them, exchange them, remember by means of them, and use them to protect ourselves, to glorify ourselves, to recreate ourselves. Imagination is how we put images to work inside and outside our minds in order to accomplish all these things.

I have called this book The Forge of Vision not because I wish to endorse Calvins views on idolatry, but because I like very much that he recognizes the cultural work seeing performs, even if he regards it in a very negative light. Moreover, the phrase acknowledges that vision is a cultural operation. The forge of vision is the cultural formation of seeing at any number of levels. Human beings are in the business of fashioning imagery that acts as their understanding of the world. Modernity has facilitated this brain function with conceptual innovations and a steady stream of new techniques in science, technology, education, commerce, artand in religion. Each of these areas of modern culture has generated images, visual practices, and image-making devices that serve as instruments for shaping imagination and grasping the world around us.

Yet perhaps because of the power and scope of such visual technologies, seeing has come under considerable suspicion in the modern era, much of it charged with an antagonism comparable to Calvins epistemological critique. Vision is often conceived as a distant, disembodied sense, and vision as contemplation or philosophical reflection in particular has been criticized as taking the shape of a remote and magisterial gaze that reduces everything it sees to its object. With this and other such mechanical explanations of human interiority, modernity took shape and the forge of vision began to emerge as an engine of cultural construction.

But fancy continued to bear the stigma of deception and the marginal status of contrivance as the faculty of seeming. The tradition of Enlightenment thought came to recognize the power of imagination for its constructive activity in conception, but also expressed wariness regarding its results. In setting out his guidelines for the proper interpretation of nature in 1620, Francis Bacon warned readers of the specious meditations, speculations, and theories of mankind that skewed genuine understanding.