Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards.

Morgan, David

Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards. By William A. Dyrness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 342 pp. $85.00 cloth; $29.99 paper.

Although William Dyrness uses the term "visual culture" to refer principally to actual images, defining it in a larger sense as the entire apparatus of seeing is more compelling since there is much to learn from the history of Reformed theology about modern visuality, or visual culture, which includes the optical, imaginative, and pictorial wherewithal of vision. The subtitle of the book is the more apt designation of Dyrness's theme since he spends most of the study plotting the rise and decline of Puritanism's attitude toward textuality and imagination. His appealing aim is to show how iconoclasm is more than a fear of images. Dyrness accomplishes this by surveying a course of theological development from Calvin to such major Reformed thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition as William Perkins, William Ames, Richard Sibbes, John Cotton, Richard Baxter, John Flavell, and Jonathan Edwards. Dyrness's central claim is that the anxiety toward images in Reformed theology and practice from Calvin to Edwards and beyond marks a significant turn from the late medieval Catholic sensibility that is not simply a denial of vision, but a redefinition of it. Calvin and his followers refused to reduce God to the matrix of human desire, which served them as the negative definition of vision that underscored the sovereignty of God. Imagination in this sense was the fanciful assembly of mental fictions according to human ends and therefore a transformation of the divine into idols of human vanity. Calvin insisted that images could not teach anything true about God because they were the product of imagination. The word of God was the medium chosen by God for divine revelation and therefore the only means of coming to genuine knowledge of God.

But Dryness shows that there is more to consider than this negation of image and imagination. Indeed, he argues that the marginalization of one visual sensibility allowed for the emergence of another, one in which word and image were integrated in a new form of imaging, both mental and pictorial. By turning away from the intercessional use of images in worship and devotional life (images that mediated the relationship between devout viewer and the divine), Reformed Protestants were able to cultivate a practice of inwardness that focused on a rigorous examination of the self. The result was an itemization of sins and an internal topography of the self that mapped out one's journey toward God along a rocky and protracted path of conviction, contrition, and (hopefully) eventual conversion. It was the path narratized most effectively among Reformed Protestants by John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. This ordering of inner life variously took the shape of a taxonomy or a geography in which articulation was a primary technique: breaking down the self and its journey into their constituent parts. Time became as important as vision, resulting in their intermingling and what may best be termed "imagetexts," the visual artifacts that are read and therefore, because they acted like texts, were considered safe and useful by orthodox Calvinists. Dyrness examines the diagrammatic charts produced by the rhetorician Peter Ramus and English Calvinist academics who were influenced by his work. Organized as graphic schemes of the essential parts of an argument, the tabular structures of these diagrams visually encapsulated the shape of thought, envisioning the movement of thought from whole to part. Dyrness claims that these graphic forms helped their Reformed users to visualize an intimate linkage of mind and world and therefore constituted a new form of imagination.

The schematic imagination is evident throughout the visual productions of British and American Reformed Protestants from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. But it also predated the Reformation by several centuries. The diagrams illustrating the millennial thought of Joachim of Fiore evince a similar sensibility. Lutheran and Pietist imagery bears a comparable sense of form and textuality. Nor is the visual inwardness of Ignatian spirituality altogether different. The international print culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe circulated the same visual sensibility among Catholics and Protestants of many kinds. Nevertheless, the consistency among Reformed believers is striking, and Dyrness helpfully pulls together a range of secondary studies in his analysis of important thinkers. For those unfamiliar with the visual artifacts of the age, he also helpfully traces the features familiar in prints and paintings in a variety of other kinds of "imagetexts" such as grave stones, garden design, architecture, and town planning among Reformed Christians in Britain, Holland, and America.

The study complicates its task by confusing world-image, mentalite, and imagination. A more careful distinction of these and a rigorous theorization of visual culture would be welcome. And Dyrness calls for further scholarship on the legacy of Reformed sensibility in the visual culture following the period he studies, apparently unaware of the number and variety of studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American Protestant visual culture. In fact, the legacy of the schematic imagination clearly survives the demise of Puritanism. One has only to consider the abundance of tract and Bible illustrations undertaken by latter-day Reformed Protestants such as the Congregationalist and Presbyterian membership of the American Tract Society, which in the first decades of the nineteenth century championed the "plain style" of Puritan simplicity and directness in its illustrated publications. Other obvious examples of the imagetext are the hieroglyphic Bibles still in print after the Civil War and deriving directly from the emblematic tradition that Dyrness examines. And the schematic, tabular sensibility of Puritanism is robustly embraced in the intricately designed millennial charts used by Adventists William Miller and James White, and in the early twentieth century by the Dispensationalist Clarence Larkin. In fact, they are still in use. Moreover, illustrated versions of Bunyan's classic as well as excerpts of Baxter, Flavell, and Edwards were a mainstay of the American Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union well into the nineteenth century.

David Morgan

Valparaiso University