Reformation and the Visual Arts

The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe

Sergiusz Michalski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134921027
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Covering a vast geographical and chronological span, and bringing new and exciting material to light, The Reformation and the Visual Arts provides a unique overvie of religious images and iconoclasm, starting with the consequences of the Byzantine image controversy and ending with the Eastern Orthodox churches of the nineteenth century. The author argues that the image question played a large role in the divisions within European Protestantism and was intricately connected with the Eucharist controversy. He analyses the positions of the major Protestant reformers - Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Karlstadt - on the legitimacy of religious paintings and investigates iconoclasm both as a form of religious and political protest and as a complex set of mock-revolutionary rites and denigration rituals. The book also contains new research on relations between Protestant iconoclasm and the extreme icon-worship of the Eastern Orthodox churches, and provides a brief discussion of Eastern protestantizing sects, especially in Russia.

1

Martin Luther: Cultic Abuse, Religious Art and Christian Freedom

In an irate moment, the great German Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn, musing on the aesthetic decline of German culture, singled out the culprit—none other than Martin Luther. According to Benn, this ‘dirty Saxon’ had, by turning to secondary problems of conscience, destroyed the great artistic forms of the Middle Ages, the symbiosis between art and Church. Worse still, Luther himself had not even the least inkling of ‘problems of Form’.¹

Since Catholicism is generally perceived as the aesthetic religion per se, such criticisms were not confined to angry poets. Lesser spirits have vented their anger at the ‘iconoclast Protestants’, the destroyers and enemies of visual and sensual culture, and in this context pointed the accusing finger at Luther as the founder and shaper of the Reformation. A chain of ‘aesthetically motivated’ conversions to Catholicism, started by Winckelmann and continued by the St Lucas Brotherhood at the beginning of the nineteenth century brought this problem to popular attention. The response of Protestant German leaders in projecting an image of Lutheranism as an enlightened ‘high religion’ implied some oversensitivity on the subject, but it was unable to create a new aesthetic approach.

It must be said, however, that most of the anti-Luther critiques were manifestly misdirected. As the imagery of his writings attests, Luther was a man of strong visual and sensual impulses. He would also be the last to claim to have devised a new order of culture or civilization or what his compatriots (almost untranslatably) call Weltentwurf (a universal paradigm). His ambitions certainly did not go that far.

Despite the fact that history ranks him alongside the great founders of new faiths, such as Muhammad or Buddha, Luther himself always repudiated states of ecstatic communion with God or open aspirations to spiritual leadership. He regarded himself only as a humble exegete of the Scriptures and, more importantly, wished to be regarded as no more than that—as one of those who by their actions and their example lead the Christian community back to its sources. In his own mind he was only trying to rectify a rampant evil in the universal Church.

In one sense the post-biblical and medieval tradition in the Church, which Luther denounced as illegitimate, had some natural basis, for it had grown up as a result of centuries of intermingled religious experiences, both good and bad, and was unquestionably a hallowed tradition in the eyes of individual believers. Although Luther did not advocate a concept of Christian life as all-embracing or—to use a somewhat discredited word—as holistic as that of the Catholic Church (most of the disputes and controversies in the Reformation camp would hinge on the pivotal point of the highly ambiguous notion ‘freedom of the Christian man’, which was formulated by none other than Luther himself), nevertheless he had in a brief period of time to define his position on the whole life of the Christian world. In a longer perspective his solution would expand the limits of Christian freedom; in the short term it had to be normative and arbitrary. The changes initiated by Luther involved a dialectic of continual conflict, a constant oscillation between liberty (libertas) and law (lex)—to use his own terms. This dialectic can be perceived in the problem that interests us here: namely, that of art and its place in the Protestant world.

Art obviously belonged to the second, non-canonical part of ecclesiastical and public life; it had grown up and assumed certain forms in the millennium and a half of Christian history. Up to Luther’s time art had been almost exclusively religious. In Northern Europe the division into secular and religious art had not yet crystallized and impinged on the consciousness of wider circles of artists and viewers of art; moreover, the notion of ‘secular things’ often had a pejorative sense.² Despite this, art had no direct canonical sanction, no biblical legitimation. Quite the contrary: many passages from the Bible seemed to deny its validity. Art was only part of the sanctioned practice of Christian life, part of what Luther called the visible Church.

When Luther and his followers launched a large-scale attack on the structure of this Church, the problem of art was only marginal to their interests. It so happened, however, that the question of art confronted Luther in dramatic form, in the shape of the Wittenberg iconoclastic riots, and forced him to take an unequivocal and, what is worse, an instant stance. Luther was not a man who radically changed a position once it had been taken, so that his decisions were not always based on adequate reflection. Many of his pronouncements on less important matters—and this was how he regarded the dispute over art—were instrumental, calculated for immediate effect. Except for a few shorter passages and two longer sections in his tract Against the Heavenly Prophets and in the so-called Lenten Sermons, his views are scattered throughout his vast writings of more than a hundred volumes, in brief remarks in letters, and in the less reliable source of his Table Talk.³

During his youth, which was spent in Eisleben, in Eisenach, and then as a student and monk in Erfurt, Luther did not have many opportunities to encounter the problem of art. It did not play a very important role in the social life of Germany, with the possible exception of Nuremberg. It was not only that the social sphere to which Luther belonged, the traditional lower middle class, was indifferent to art, for even the humanists of Northern Europe, including the great Erasmus, showed little understanding of its problems, while the patriciate was only just preparing itself for its new role as patrons of art.

In the theologians’ camp there were also numerous signs of a negative approach to the various manifestations of the cult of images,⁴ although this was an entirely marginal problem in the general consciousness of the age. Luther accepted wholly uncritically the forms of religious art which he encountered in his own environment, just as he zealously accepted all manifestations of late medieval devotion. To him the visible Church was an intermediary and not an obstacle to attaining the majesty and grace of God. A dozen years or so after the watershed of 1517, when, according to his Table Talk, he harked back to the years of his youth, he rarely made any mention of his attitude towards what were often extreme manifestations of image worship. To some extent this shows that it was not a problem that initially concerned him.

The appearance of a new theological consciousness in Luther, at odds with existing doctrine, was a subcutaneous process of which he himself was hardly aware. Luther did not want to create a new doctrine: he only sought to answer several questions on the salvation of man that were troubling him, and he certainly did not want to bring about a schism in the Church. The role of leader of a new faith was largely imposed on him by his opponents and a set of infelicitous circumstances. Personal and historical coincidences confronted the young lecturer (and, from 1512, Doctor of Theology) at the newly founded University of Wittenberg with theological and social problems of such magnitude and in such a context that their solution became a logical stage in the birth-process of Reformation theology. Luther instinctively found his theological starting-points and just as instinctively moved away from them, indeed from entire theological positions, when they no longer satisfied him.

Luther started from nominalism. This fact is particularly emphasized by Catholic scholars, for it enables them to find ‘Catholic features’ even in Luther’s later Reformation views. His nominalist formation contributed to the fact that he conceived of the image as a conventional, relative sign: this was later to weigh heavily in his stance on images. From nominalism also came his characteristic awareness of the immeasurable distance between God and humanity. Luther, however, immediately asked himself the next, famous question: ‘How can I gain the grace of God?’. This was a key question, for it-played the main role in deliberations on human salvation. The nominalists, who emphasized the omnipotence of God, pushed Christ into the background: what is more, they did not perceive the role of grace in the process of salvation. For them God was the foundation of faith, but he could not be grasped through reason. With the nominalists, however, to give up asking questions about God did not lead to questions about the human condition. And this was what chiefly interested Luther.

Not until 1516, in his Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, did he find a formula with which to characterize the human condition. Man is ‘simul iustus et simul peccator’ (simultaneously a sinner and simultaneously just), thanks to faith in justice and above all in the grace of God. Luther put the main emphasis on faith in God’s grace, without which there can be no salvation. Thirty years later, when the Lutheran theologian Osiander wanted to return to the conception of God’s justice as the main element in the work of salvation, he met with a violent reaction from other Lutherans. This was justified by the circumstances: the notion of grace was to be the key element of the future Lutheran doctrine. Here the influence of St Augustine was most strongly felt.

The premise of divine grace (Dei gratia) became the basis for dividing the history of mankind into the periods sub lege and sub gratia—the first under the domination of the law, and the second under the dispensation of grace, a division exemplified by the Old and the New Testament. Man can gain grace through faith alone (sola fide)—a notion formulated by Luther on the basis of St Paul. In his Sermon on Good Works, published in 1520, Luther thus consistently rejected the importance of good works for salvation. He thereby questioned the primary driving-force of medieval religiosity, a force to which art was so indebted.

In this very abbreviated presentation of Luther’s theological assumptions we have naturally ignored chronology, especially the course of well-known political events, and the origins of the process of organization of the new Church itself. Let us return now to the very beginnings of Luther’s Reformation theology: that is, to 1516. From this period comes his first pronouncement on religious art.

In his university Lectures on the Epistle to the Corinthians he stated: ‘to build churches, to adorn them … with images and everything that we have in houses of worship … all these are shadows of things worthy of children’. This is unquestionably a severe criticism of church art, though from a traditional position. There is no trace as yet of a future Reformation viewpoint, but between the lines one can infer a criticism of luxury and unnecessary expenditure. In the next two years he was to take up this theme several times. Yet he thought it fitting to tone down his criticism, stating in the same passage: ‘Why should we fall into the heresy of the Beghards … and not tolerate any churches and ornaments? No!’⁵ This passage is very characteristic of Luther, for one can see here in miniature, as it were, a foreshadowing of the same approach in the later Lenten Sermons, an approach defiantly defending art against doctrinaire thinkers who arbitrarily demanded its complete destruction. Luther probably had in mind not the Beghards but the Hussites. In 1516 Luther was still a loyal son of the Church, which accounts for his hostile attitude towards the Hussites, an attitude which was quickly to change.

In 1516–18 there were more remarks indicating Luther’s initially hostile attitude towards religious art. In his Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews we read: ‘God the Father created Christ to be the idea and sign which believers ought to transform into a [mental] image in order to turn away from the images of the world’.⁶ Juxtaposing the incarnation of Christ—understood as the perfect intertwining of thought and sign—with the images of the world clearly has negative implications for art, especially when one considers how important Christological arguments were for Luther. Here Christ is compared with the supreme sign. A few years later Luther would abandon this dangerous line of reasoning because of the controversy over the Eucharist and the question of images.

From the Lectures on the Decalogue of 1516–17 one can infer that a good part of the arguments of the enemies of religious images was nonetheless unconvincing to Luther. Analysing the First Commandment (‘You shall not have other gods beside me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth’),⁷ Luther indirectly opposed any iconoclastic interpretation of this passage. He distinguished between forbidden adoration of ‘trees, stones, animals’ and the cult due to God. ‘Having images’ was not forbidden in itself.⁸ Moreover, basing himself on a well-known theological opposition foris/intus, Luther distinguished between exterior idolatry, which included the cult of images, and a more dangerous interior idolatry: namely, the idols which every person has in his or her heart.

The consequences of this distinction can be found a few years later in the discussion with Karlstadt on ‘internal and external idols’ and the order in which they should be removed. This was another premise of Luther’s later position that inclined him to regard certain forms of religious art favourably. The importance of these trains of thought from his earlier period should not be exaggerated, however. They were muffled by his rejection of the cult of images and his generally unfriendly attitude towards matters of art. Social and ecclesiastical arguments of greater importance to him seemed especially in this period to incline him against religious art.

In thesis 50 of the ninety-five allegedly nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 Luther stated that St Peter’s Church in Rome was being erected ‘at the cost of the skin, meat and bones of the Pope’s flock’.⁹ In his Explanations of the Theses (1518) Luther expanded on the problem of the social costs of the cult of images. In the commentary to thesis 31 he stated: The first and main [good deed] is to help a beggar or one’s neighbour in need. This ought to be done even at the cost of interrupting the construction of churches … or interrupting the collection of contributions and offerings for the purchase of liturgical vessels or church decorations.’¹⁰

The most forceful, and at the same time the most fully considered approach to this problem is found in his Sermon on Usury (1519–20). Here Luther’s sharp condemnation of unnecessary expenses for church decorations is tempered by the stipulation that certain elements of the Visible Church’ are necessary. ‘But we ought to draw a boundary line and see to it that the cult is pure rather than costly …. It would be better if we gave less to the churches and altars … and more to the needy.’¹¹ Thus the question of the social costs of art—for that is what it should be called—had a considerable impact on Luther’s approach to the question of images in the years 1519–22. Thereafter this issue resurfaced very rarely.

However, by 1520–1 the problems of art had become linked to certain theological conceptions in ways that laid a solid theological foundation for Luther’s later pronouncements on art. Luther began to apply to idea of rejecting justification through works (Werkheiligkeit) to various aspects of ecclesiastical and social life. He started from the most immediate problem, that of indulgences, then moved through an intermediate stage, the fight against the cult and collection of relics, and finally arrived at the problem of art in the service of the Church: that is, art as an instrument in the efforts of each believer or of entire communities to acquire merit with God through which to earn salvation. Achieving salvation through works conflicted with the notion of sola fide and with the belief in the omnipotence of God’s inscrutable will.

In his Sermon on Good Works Luther states that through endowing churches or images or through ‘running to images’ believers were only trying to buy their way into heaven. He emphasizes strongly the fact that this is the main driving force behind the cult of images especially in the case of religious pictures or statues. What was dangerous was not pure image worship—the belief that some emanation or even part of the sacred is immanent in a work of art (in Luther’s opinion, few of the faithful believed in this)—but the misguided desire to gain salvation through endowing images and sculptures: ‘This is why I have so often spoken against such works [endowing images] … since among a thousand faithful it is hard to find even one who did not place hope in this, who did not want to gain the grace of God in this way.’¹²

An important role was also played by the publication towards the end of 1520 of his famous treatise On the Freedom of the Christian Man. Ostensibly its message was directed against the visual and ceremonial elements of religion. ‘And that is why I greatly fear that few or no monasteries, nunneries, altars and church offices are Christian today; nor are fast-days or special prayers to some of the saints.’ Once again Luther states that ‘in all of this one seeks nothing else but one’s own benefit: namely, when we believe that through this our sins will be absolved and salvation gained’.¹³ The cutting-edge of the treatise was obviously directed against the existing practice of the faith, hence indirectly against the cult of images as well. Later in the treatise, however, Luther compares ‘rites’ to the scaffolding indispensable in the construction of a house; moreover, when he goes on to say that certain ‘rites’ are dangerous, he implies that to change them gradually rather than to reject them radically would be proof of the fortitude and steadfastness of a Christian, the real proof of Christian ‘freedom’.

Such elements, which served to moderate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Martin Luther: cultic abuse, religious art and Christian freedom
• 2. The iconophobes: Karlstadt, Zwingli and Calvin
• 3. Iconoclasm: rites of destruction
• 4. Icon and pulpit: the Eastern Churches and the Reformation
• 5. Symbols and commonplaces, or the conceptual background of the dispute on images
• Appendix: Protestant and Muslim aniconism: attempts at comparison
• Notes
• Guide to further reading
• Index