Visualizing the Ascension

LECTURE: “The Problems and Possibilities of Visual Theology:The Ascension as a Case Study” by Jonathan A. Anderson

With Ascension Day coming up on May 29 (today!), it’s timely to share this talk given by Jonathan Anderson from a few years ago at Duke Divinity School, where he worked as a postdoctoral associate of theology and the visual arts from 2020 to 2023. Anderson explores a handful of images depicting the Ascension of Christ, a particularly challenging subject because of the spatial ambiguity. The scriptural accounts of the event (Luke 24:50–53 and Acts 1:6–11) beg the question, “What does ‘lifted up’ mean? Where is Jesus?” Attempting to work out these spatial difficulties visually can be theologically fruitful and enlightening, Anderson claims—even if it sometimes leads to unsatisfying results, as, Anderson says, it often does in Western art from the Renaissance onward. By contrast, when artists focus not so much on what the Ascension looks like as a historical event but rather on what it means, they are generally more successful.

Check out the discussion of Andrei Rublev's The Ascension at time-stamp 38:33: “Fundamental to all [the Ascension icons of the East],” Anderson says, “is the notion that the Ascension doesn’t have much to do with a higher part of the atmosphere (which Western images are continually struggling with) but with an entirely different kind of space. The relevant coordinates here are not down and up, or even higher and lower, but earth and heaven, old creation and new creation.” Anderson’s quotation of Douglas B. Farrow’s Ascension Theology is illuminating!