Robin Jensen's recent book, From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity (2022), brings together and summarizes in lucid prose her deep knowledge and many years of experience studying the relationship between early Christian art and theology. Animating this brief but useful book is an observation that an undergraduate student made to the author over 20 years ago: "idolatry consists not in worshipping images but rather in worshipping images of the wrong god". (xv) The book follows this thesis in eight succinct chapters and an epilogue, all richly illustrated, that outline the chronological development of early Christian attitudes towards religious artworks. Throughout, she attends to how early Christian theologians negotiated their polemics against polytheist uses of images alongside their (often-tacit) acceptance of images in Christian worship. Focused on literary sources and their responses to art, archaeological contexts are largely ignored. Still, From Idols to Icons provides a useful starting place for students with theological interest to engage with Early Christian art.

From the start, Jensen addresses the erroneous idea that early Christians were opposed to images, a misperception due to scholarly misreadings of their polemics, clarifying that early Christian apologists were not hostile to images per se, but rather to polytheist uses of them. Apologists attacked the contrived nature of traditional images of the gods and, to them, idolatry consisted more in worshipping false gods than in breaking the mosaic prohibition on graven images.

Chapters one through three summarize and consider these Christian arguments. The first chapter grounds the theological literature by addressing discussions of polytheists' images, image consecration as well the scriptural and terminological issues upon which this literature depends. Chapters two and three, on aniconism and epiphanies, respectively, trace how early Christian authors approached their deity's (in)visibility. When Jews and Christians found it necessary to represent this deity pictorially, they favored abstract or symbolic motifs such as the disembodied hand of God. At the same time, early Christians also explored ways to figure God by representing theophanies and Jesus's earthly ministry.

Chapters four through seven consider the development of early Christian narrative art and religious portraiture. As shown in the first three chapters, we cannot attribute the paucity of Christian images from the first two centuries CE to Christian anxiety over art. Rather, as other scholars have also observed, early Christians likely continued to use the motifs and conventions of earlier visual culture, making their own adaptations indistinguishable from their contexts. Once discernibly Christian images do appear, they display adaptable symbolic types or biblical narrative scenes. This early absence of holy portraiture, Jensen suggests, likely came from Christian concerns over emulating the "cultic gaze," as particularly afforded by sculpture (81-85). Nevertheless, a tradition of portraiture did emerge in Christian visual culture by the late fourth century. While these images drew the ire of some pious observers, they were generally accepted over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries.

The establishment of holy portraiture in Christian visual culture spurred two further developments, the subjects of chapters six and seven: a need to assess the authenticity of portrait likeness and the use of portraits to mediate experience of the divine. The appearance of Jesus was particularly varied, as Jensen captures in a wonderful section on the polymorphy of Christ in Early Christian literature (113-115) and on the variability of Jesus's images at sites such as Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. Chapter Seven covers miraculous images not made by human hands, miracle-working images, and the connections between images and relics. This chapter broadly places images within a larger world of Christian material practice in devotion and worship.

Chapter 8 concerns the fourth-century reevaluation of matter and image in Christian devotional practice that scholars have labelled a "material turn." There are no simple explanations that can fully explain this transformation in Christian attitudes. Jensen highlights pitfalls with earlier explanations, ranging from the persistence of "pagan" practices, the putative rise of incarnational theology, to Constantine's imperial formalization of the Church. Each of these explanations encounters its own problems and, the author argues, many material practices were the result of earlier developments (150). What else might explain changes in Early Christian attitudes to matter and images? Neoplatonic reappraisals of material reality that treated the material as an avenue for approaching the divine, she concludes, offer a better context for understanding developments in Christian thought. Whether through direct borrowing or perhaps parallel developments, Christian theologians applied similar ways of thinking when rationalizing the place of the material in their own devotional practices.

Iconoclasm is addressed in the book's epilogue. Here the author discusses scattered, if suggestive (and contradictory), examples of iconoclastic Christian responses to polytheists' images. Yet anxiety over idolatry continues to pop up in new contexts over time. Byzantine and Protestant bouts of iconoclasm, in particular, have shaped the scholarly debates this book addresses, and even altered the textual record itself - a point that Jensen is often at pains to note when working with sources tinged by retroactive iconophile revisionism.

From Idols to Icons provides a clear synthesis of the relationship between art and theology in Early Christianity that reflects the depth of its author's expertise. Still, individual artworks are often spatially, socially, and ritually decontextualized; fuller art-historical and archaeological context will need to be sought elsewhere. [1] And while the book masterfully and succinctly covers major debates and concerns within the field of Early Christian art, the bibliography overlooks some important recent developments in the field. [2] The principal value of the volume is in its summative narrative and pedagogical utility; in eight succinct chapters the field of Early Christian art is opened up in a readable, inviting, and engaging format that provides a solid ground for future studies of early Christian image-making.

Notes:

[1] For example, while the author treats the Serapis and Isis paintings in the Getty (109, fig. 6.1) as parts of a triptych, the pintles on them suggest that they may have been doors for a niche or naiskos shrine, as proposed by Thomas Mathews in a source cited by the author (Thomas Mathews: The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons, Los Angeles 2016, 110).

[2] Ann Marie Yasin's Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (2009) on social factors in the creation of sacred spaces, Laura Nasrallah's Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture (2010), and Armin Bergmeier's Visionserwartung: Visualisierung und Präsenzerfahrung des Göttlichen in der Spätantike (2017) on theophanic imagery in Early Christian art are some notable absences.

Andrew Griebeler