The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art.

by Paul Corby Finney Oxford University Press, $45,319 pp.

There is no Christian art which can be dated before A.D. 200. The conventional wisdom explaining this absence as well as the subsequent rise of art is that the Christians inherited the tradition coming from Judaism that was hostile to art in theory and practice. Pressures from below by the uneducated masses eroded the authority of the aniconic tradition, and the introduction of pictorial art was a compromise of the essential aniconic tradition of early Christianity. It is the burden of Finney's immensely learned book to show that the conventional wisdom is not right.

That there is no identifiable Christian art before A. D. 200 Finney concedes; that this absence is best explained because of prejudice against art Finney denies. His thesis is that it took a certain period for Christians to understand themselves as a separate culture since they had no long tradition, no separate language or costume, nor were they ethnically separate. Once they had a "culture," then they could, as a culture, acquire property. The pictorial decoration of that property and what anthropologists call a "material culture" followed. This culture jelled, as it were, in the period of the Roman Tetrarchy, which is to say, circa A.D. 200.

Finney sets out his argument against the standard consensus in microscopic detail. He denies that the "anti-art" polemics in the early patristic writings should be seen as the basis for an aniconic theology; rather, they should be seen as an antipagan polemic. Furthermore, he makes the very intelligent (and valuable) observation that one reason why Christianity spread is because it was able to take over elements of the regnant culture and put it to its own uses (which is the way, for instance, he "reads" the first products of Christian art).

In the final section, Finney examines in fine detail the first examples of Christian art, both in terms of style and iconography. Some may find his final pages daunting, peppered as they are with lines in Italian, French, Latin, German, and Greek (he does not translate his epigraphical citations, which led me to my dictionary more than once). But given his thoroughness and his abundant bibliographies, this is a treasure trove for further explorations. It has taken me a long time to work my way through this dense volume but I must say the effort was well worth it. I would also like to pay tribute to the fine prose style of the author. He is a pleasure to read, even when the material at hand is rough going.