Although the discovery of figurative frescoes decorating the third-century house church in Syria’s Dura-Europos and the existence of Christian iconography in the Roman catacombs have proved Calvin’s chronology to be off by a couple of centuries, his characterization of an early and pristinely aniconic Christianity has persisted. Much of the persistence of this error derives from centuries of misreadings of Christian apologetic texts that disparage depictions of polytheists’ gods, wrongly judged to be sweeping and effective critiques of all types of religious pictorial art. Thus, commentators have presumed, like Calvin, that faithful Christians would have obeyed biblical injunctions against graven images and worshiped in spaces unadorned by figurative decoration of any kind. Accordingly, the third-century emergence of identifiably Christian art would signify a precipitous descent into superstitious idolatry.

Following Calvin, Edward Gibbon’s great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written in the mid- to late eighteenth century, describes early Christians as not only aniconic but vehemently anti-iconic:

Modern historians have echoed Calvin and Gibbon’s belief that faithful early Christians avoided making or using religious pictorial art. During the mid-twentieth century, the art historian Ernst Kitzinger portrayed early Christians as otherworldly anti-materialists who vigorously resisted pagan visual culture, arguing that it was “not before the second half of the fourth century that any writer began to speak of Christian pictorial art in positive terms.”³ A few decades later Kitzinger modified this slightly, claiming that the early church upheld its “taboo against religious images” until about 200 CE.⁴ Taking a more critical stance, Theodor Klauser, the German historian of Christian liturgy, archeology, and theology, similarly characterized early Christians as resisting their decadent surrounding culture.⁵ Henry Chadwick’s 1967 church history handbook includes a chapter on Christian art that cites the anti-idol writing of early church fathers and applies it to religious visual art in general: “The second of the Ten Commandments forbade the making of any graven image. Both Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria regarded this prohibition as absolute and binding on Christians. Images and statues belonged to the demonic world of paganism.” Chadwick then refers to Irenaeus’s writing as evidence that the only early Christians who possessed images of Christ were “radical Gnostics, the followers of the licentious Carpocrates.”⁶ More recently, Hans Belting maintained that “in the beginning, the Christian religion did not allow for any concession in its total rejection of the religious image” and offered the fact that “images in religious use were in open contradiction to the Mosaic law of the ancient Jews” as an overriding reason for this stance. The church’s eventual acceptance of images, Belting claims, was “an unexpected change from very early and very important convictions.”⁷

Such commonplace perceptions—that early Christians were uniformly hostile to any kind of pictorial imagery and therefore Christian art did not exist (or, if it did, belonged only to heretical groups)—remained fairly consistent among Christian historians until the late 1970s. Perhaps the earliest gainsayer was Sister Mary Charles-Murray, whose 1977 essay “Art and the Early Church” opens with the question of whether the “universally held . . . fact” that the early church was hostile to art “has any foundation in reality.”⁸ Some years later, Paul Corby Finney followed Charles-Murray with an influential monograph, The Invisible God, in which he argues for the early acceptance of visual art by Christians and refuses to attribute that development merely to the accommodation of halfhearted pagan converts or pragmatic capitulation to the surrounding culture.⁹

Those scholars who concluded that early Christian apologists represented the position of church authorities as unambiguously hostile to religious pictorial art consequently attributed the advent of Christian iconography to either the desires of backsliding laity or overly tolerant leaders who grudgingly accommodated it. For them, the incorporation of art in places of worship therefore signaled a disconnect between popular and official religious practices and an unfortunate capitulation to polytheistic habits. Yet as historians like Charles-Murray and Finney have argued, Christian apologists’ denunciations of pagan idolatry never attacked works of art per se. Instead, they aimed their censure primarily at a specific type of object: cult images of pagan deities that devotees venerated as if they were the gods themselves. Thus, these early writers did not repudiate religious figurative sculpture or painting in any general sense or regard it as idolatrous; the definition of an idol depended on what or who the object depicted and how viewers regarded and treated it.

The pagan Caecilius presents many objections to Christian practices, among them the absence of pictorial depictions of the Christian deity. He contends that this deficiency is objectively perverse and incriminating. Because, he argues, the gods of honorable cults are both public and visible, Christians must be concealing a disreputable or scandalous deity.¹¹ In reply, Octavius admits that Christians do not make images of their god but insists that this is not because the deity is disgraceful but because God is invisible. The Christian god, he continues, does not inhabit a temple, cannot be contained by any human-made structure, and cannot be localized in an earthly dwelling. Although this nameless and invisible god is beyond sense perception, the cosmos abounds with evidence of this divinity’s power and majesty. Inconceivable, infinite, boundless, eternal, and uncircumscribable, this deity has no name other than God.¹² Thus, he asserts, Christian thought corresponds to that of pagan poets and philosophers: they agree that the Divine Being is pure mind, reason, and spirit, indescribable and incomprehensible.¹³

Octavius reminds his pagan friend that they both believe in invisible things: the wind, for instance, and the human soul. Turning to religious practices, he insists that cultivating a pure mind and a virtuous heart is far more devout than offering victims on sacrificial altars. Christians express their devotion and gratitude to their god by doing works of justice or by offering charity to neighbors, not by pouring libations or venerating statues.¹⁴ By this he aims to demonstrate that Christianity is ethically and intellectually superior to polytheism, insofar as it is truer than a cult that involves external objects or ceremonies while simultaneously ignoring the welfare of others or the development of a wholesome interior disposition.

Yet rather than simply claiming that Christianity’s lack of images and temples demonstrates its rational and moral superiority, Octavius ridicules visual representations of polytheists’ gods. He declares that is it simple minded to offer prayers or gifts to cult images and especially to be beguiled by costly or beautiful objects made by artisans from silver, bronze, ivory, or gold. Worshiping insensate objects crafted by human hands from base materials subject to rust and decay is absurd. Such things can harbor nests of mice and are often covered with spiders’ webs or birds’ droppings. The idol makers are themselves lewd, depraved, and immoral.¹⁵ Adding that the gods they depict are oblivious to the fabrication, consecration, and supplication of their portraits, he contends that they are not even really gods at all. They are simply long-dead kings or heroes, enrolled among deities (even against their will) by later generations. Similarly, illusory, ridiculous, and often made from sordid and discarded vessels, their images are in no way sacred.¹⁶ Here Octavius echoes Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians to assert that idols don’t actually exist (1 Cor 8:4).

Nevertheless, although he judges that venerating images is a pointless way of honoring the gods and portrays these statues as inert and useless objects, Octavius also claims that such things often become convenient vehicles for dangerous demons who lurk within or near them. When malevolent spirits enter and inhabit such images, they do so to deceive devotees and drag their souls into ruin. They take on the appearances and names of the gods whose images they occupy and whose shrines they haunt. They gorge themselves on the sacrificial offerings. Even verified auguries or oracles associated with cult effigies are contrivances of wandering spirits w...