The Divine Body: God, Gender, and the Diversity of Early Christianity

Public Symposium and Art Exhibit on Images of Divinity in Western Art, Literature, Liturgy, and the Modern Media

Columbia University

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Union Theological Seminary

Where: Columbia University, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and Union Theological Seminary
When: The Symposium is tentatively set to take place in October of 2005.

Background

I have been working on this project for the past five years, inspired by my own religious upbringing and the so-called "Gnostic" literature unearthed in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. My work explores why we associate ourselves with certain images of religious tenderness, religious fervor, and religious guilt. Mentored by Professor Elaine Pagels (Dept. of Religion, Princeton University), I have been working to draw a comparison in my painting between traditional Christian iconography and "heretical" ideas that never survived to birth artistic representation. Ideas that have been gathered under the rubric "Gnosticism" and branded "heretical" have, for me, broadened the scope of stories with which to view the history and heritage of Christianity. With my work, I hope to engage the viewer in an exploration of how religious art might have been different if these lost texts had not been suppressed. Scholarship about the Nag Hammadi Library has, until recently, been difficult to access within the walls of academia. One of my goals with my artwork, the interdisciplinary forum, and with my book, is to make these rich texts and traditions more accessible to the non-scholar. At the same time, I hope to show how images from the past have shaped our modern and contemporary perceptions of the divine and human alike. How might we perceive God, this world, and ourselves differently had some of these texts been allowed to survive?

Public Symposium

The one day public symposium will be a series of panel discussions involving scholars, artists and religious clergy around the depiction of the divine in art and liturgy, in conjunction with a six week long art exhibition. The artwork will be by artists whose work reflects similar questions around spirituality and a general curiosity about religion. The exhibition and symposium are tentatively set to take place at Union Theological Seminary, The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Columbia University in October of 2005.

Topics

There are several topics and directions that the discussions and lectures of the Symposium may take. Though this is yet to be decided, there are numerous topics that I have proposed be discussed:

I. The Divine

• How does one gain access to the divine? Is it through an individual's intuitive insight or is it through divine instruction limited only to the church leaders? Historically, how has this been decided and how does this reflect our modern understanding of what the divine is, and how one gains access to it? When comparing The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Mary to the canonical gospels, how do we picture God? How might Christian art have looked had these gospels informed the pictorial tradition?

• Why has Christianity claimed exclusive rights to God? In recognition of the latest scholarship on the diversity of the early Christian communities, how does this challenge the exclusivity that traditional Christianity has claimed to God?

• Who is Christian? Prior to the drafting of the Nicene Creed, in the first few centuries of Christianity, what were some of the ways that early Christians described salvation? Were their beliefs in accordance with the ultimate and formative decisions made later at the council of Nicaea? How did the Nicene Creed create an exclusivity of belief within the Church? Is it necessary to believe in the Nicene Creed in order to claim that one is Christian?

• What is Sin? How do depictions of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection institute the concept of sin and redemption within the church? How are these events portrayed in The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Thomas as opposed to the canonical gospels? How do these gospels differ in their view and description of what sin is? How, as a result, would the Crucifixion and the Resurrection be portrayed differently if these other gospels informed these images? How does this change the meaning and interpretation of traditionally depicted imagery like The Crucifixion, The Transfiguration, The Resurrection and The Last Judgment?

II. The Spiritual Imagination

• Who decides the limits of the spiritual imagination? How has the historical church informed, liberated and repressed creativity and human imagination? How has artistic and creative expression squeezed through to ask questions that exceed the boundaries of church doctrine?

• How has the Christian pictorial tradition influenced the meaning and formulations of modern art? How is the whole process of creating, looking at, and experiencing art influenced by the Christian pictorial tradition? How might we conceive of art differently if the experience of attaining enlightenment had historically been through personal exploration and creative intuition?

• Why is there only a masculine depiction of the divine within the Judeo-Christian tradition? Compare the depiction of the divine in Old and New Testament to the image of God within Valentinian cosmogony and in texts like The Gospel of Truth. How is God depicted differently in each text? What might art have looked like had these texts, which include a feminine depiction of the divine, informed Christian art? May this have ultimately changed gender relations in both the past and present?

III. The Body

• How is the human body pictured? Both within historical and contemporary art as well as through modern media imagery, how do we perceive ourselves in relation to the physical --to youthfulness and sexuality--? How is this reflective of our cultural and religious past? How, for example, has the female body been seen both as alluring to men, and also a source of sin and shame? How does our new understanding of early Christian sources change the relationship of the body to the soul and the relationship of the sexes to eachother?

• Why is sex equated with sin and shame? The gnostic writer, Valentinus, describes the divine in feminine as well as masculine terms. He also uses sexual symbolism to describe Creation. This greatly contrasts the traditional association with carnal sin and the 'fall of man'. How might this have played out in a contemporary setting? Would sexuality have been even more highly exploited as the result of a permissive, rather than an oppressive society? In what way did Augustine equate sex with carnal sin and the fall of man? How does this translate to modern times in terms of our view of the body: the celebration of the body, the exploitation of the body and the protection of the body?

• How did the repression of sexuality play a role in the formulations of social order and the family as a social entity? How did the Church use this structuring of sexuality as a means to control the structure of people's lives?

More information about the forum will continue to be updated to this website as the event takes form and more information is available. For any questions about it, please feel free to contact me.