The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries.

As the phenomenal success of last year's "Glory of Byzantium" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art attests, religious art continues to exert a powerful attraction even in a secular age. It is hard to say exactly why religious art in all media and genres is so popular. A hankering for the real behind the illusion? A restlessness that is quelled only when our "hearts rest in Thee"? Or is it an obsession with the visual and tactile? A demand created by television and computer screens for what can be taken in at a glance and does not demand to be read or wrestled with? Are we drawn to the icon or to the fleeting image?

Casting Jaroslav Pelikan in the role of curator for The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries is a shrewd idea and for the most part the enterprise succeeds. The Illustrated Jesus is actually an expansion or visual supplement to Pelikan's well-received 1985 Jesus through the Centuries. Indeed, Pelikan advises the reader to return to the "text edition" for more complete exposition and documentation. In that sense, then, little need be said about the seventeen-year-old text. But the "little" that does need to be said also applies to Pelikan's magisterial multivolume work, The Christian Tradition. In neither The Christian Tradition nor The Illustrated Jesus does Pelikan show much appreciation for the texts of Christian liturgies. Yet what the church confesses about the divinity and humanity of the person of Christ is most preciously distilled in its liturgies. Drink in this elixir from the Liturgy of John Chrysostom: "When your body was in the tomb, and your soul in hell, when you were in paradise with the thief, you were at the same time, O Christ, as God, upon your throne with the Father and the Holy Spirit, infinite and filling all things." A heady theological draught.

Happily, the graphic art that has replaced so much of Pelikan's 1985 text gives broader ground for this sort of theological reflection. Walk into any Orthodox or Eastern Rite church and the iconostasis transports you to heaven in time for the eternal liturgy. Much of the art reproduced in The Illustrated Jesus was inspired by or produced for Christian worship. Many of the Western paintings in this book existed previously as altar pieces, or continue to exist as wall or ceiling murals in churches and chapels, and help create the proper environment for worship.

Painting dominates the illustrations in this volume and they are beautifully reproduced. There is a good balance of Western and Eastern art, high and low, classical and popular. Mosaics and sculpture are underrepresented, perhaps because of the difficulty in reproducing them in a flat, printed medium. Western painting seems to predominate. In that regard, one is compelled to ask why pictures of the smoky and cracked frescoes of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel are used. Why not pictures of the brilliantly restored frescoes?

We are also reminded that some images are less conducive to theological insight than others. Looking at Warner Sailman's familiar "Head of Christ" alongside Matthias Grunewald's "Resurrection" from the Isenheim Altarpiece, or Rublev's "Old Testament Trinity," reveals that some religious art is inspired more by American advertising than by mystical experience.

The attention that Pelikan gives Christian art in this book also reminds us of the importance of giving equal weight to both the literary and the monumental or graphic sources of our tradition. No scholar who offered an interpretation of an ancient civilization based exclusively on literary evidence would be taken seriously. History that analyzes a culture's architecture and art is essential. Yet frequently these sources continue to be overlooked in theological investigation.

Of course, Pelikan's book is not offered to the "scholarly" market. It is accessible to anyone. Unfortunately, the lack of proper identification for some of the pictures creates occasional confusion. In a composite icon Basil the Great is identified; but who are the other mesmerizing figures? In a chapter that recounts the monumental contribution to theology by Augustine of Hippo, this bishop and teacher is pictured with Gregory the Great. But who's who? If one had access to a dictionary of iconographic symbolism one could figure such things out for oneself. Possessed of this tool one could also determine that, contrary to the caption, the Lindau Gospels do not portray the four symbols of the Gospels.

Devotional prayer and meditation as well as the sacred liturgy have relied on the efficacy of "visual theology" since the time of the catacombs. In an increasingly pictorial age, the science of theology may now be tuning in to this visual channel. The Illustrated Jesus sets before us a theological feast for the eyes and whets our appetite for more about sacred art that is less opaque, less like a theology written in a foreign language. Yes, Sister Wendy has convinced us that art is for everybody and you don't need to be a Cambridge art historian to appreciate it. This volume returns us to the knowledge that art is more than pretty pictures - it is a way of doing theology. It is our Christian tradition.

Monsignor Joseph Fete is the rector of Saint Joseph Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio.