Art and Platonism #1

"Greek theologians found themselves debating the role and nature of Christ as He had appeared to men, against a backdrop of Platonic thought on the relation between God and the visible world. The ‘interweaving’ of human and divine by visible symbols, that so fascinated Iamblichus, is also the basic preoccupation of his younger contemporary, St. Athanasius, when he writes on the incarnation of Christ. The echo of divine beauty which had been rendered visible and so mysteriously potent, by the material image of a pagan god, later conveyed the same powers to the Christian icon. The paintings that cover the walls of a Byzantine church: the human saints that meet the believer at eye-level below scenes of the life of the incarnate Christ; the tall archangels who link Christ the ruler of the visible universe, whose distant face merges against the gold of the highest vault, with the pictures that stride down the walls into the crowd below: this scheme of ascending figures is a direct echo of the awesome sense of an invisible world made visible by art, to souls caught in the veils of a body, that had once stirred in the emperor Julian, as he stood before the altar of his gods." - Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity.