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Studies in the History of An Idea

Moshe Barasch, Luci Serrano

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780814787267
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte religioso

Over the centuries, European debate about the nature and status of images of God and sacred figures has often upset the established order and shaken societies to their core. Out of this debate, an identifiable doctrine has emerged of the image in general and of the divine image in particular. This fascinating work concentrates on these historical arguments, from the period of Late Antiquity up to the great and classic defenses of images by St. John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion. Icon extends beyond the immediate concerns of religion, philosophy, aesthetics, history, and art, to engage them all.

PART ONE

Reflections in Classical Antiquity

ONE
The Biblical Prohibition of Images

The student attempting to outline the intellectual background and sources of iconoclastic traditions in the West has a clearly defined starting point: it is the biblical prohibition of images. In the Middle Ages or during the Reformation, in the period between, say, Tertullian and Luther or Ignatius of Loyola, whoever dealt with images had to come to terms with the Second Commandment, to interpret it, and to assess its place in a comprehensive system of beliefs. Modern scholars are of course aware of the sources from which the biblical prohibition of images derived; they know that this prohibition had forerunners in prebiblical cultures.¹ But when we look at our problem from the point of view of a late antique or early medieval believer, whether highly educated or illiterate, these prebiblical sources and early cultures vanish into nothingness, disappear altogether. To the periods between early Christianity and High Baroque the biblical prohibition of images was an absolute beginning, the unprecedented formation of a persisting attitude. Had an isolated fragment of an early aniconic culture ever been noted by a medieval or humanistic scholar (as in some isolated cases may actually have happened), the scholar would have had to make it dependent in some way on what the Bible says. For fifteen centuries it was an established truth that the ban on depicting God began with the Bible.

The biblical text itself is beyond the domain in which an historian of aesthetic ideas usually feels at home. It is only in order to outline some of the sources of late antique and medieval thought on the status of sacred images that I shall make some comments on the biblical prohibition of images.

I wish I could enter the mind of a careful and pious student living in one of the centuries with which this study deals. Disturbed by ever-renewed and violent conflicts over the status of sacred images, he may have turned naively—so we imagine—to the Bible for help and instruction. What could he have found there? We know, of course, that such direct questioning of the Bible was rare in the periods we shall discuss in the following chapters. But regardless of how it was approached, the Bible was, as everybody knows, the ultimate authority. Even though as a rule the text was known only through a thick filter of interpretations, biblical attitudes determined the direction of thought. Our first task is, therefore, to understand what our student may have found, or believed to be said, in the Scriptures.

What the Old Testament says about images is not free of a certain ambiguity.² A modern student, trying to bring the concise biblical statements into a system, cannot escape the feeling that he or she is faced with contradicting attitudes. The simple question of what precisely the Scripture says about images is not easily answered. In the Middle Ages, every educated person, one assumes, must have been aware that rejection, or at least suspicion, of images was an attitude characteristic of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, there must have been additional questions. What precisely does Scripture prohibit? Could I indeed enter the pious student’s mind, I would probably realize how much he hesitated in proposing an answer, and how many of his doubts remained unresolved. Eventually he must have found—as have students in the course of many centuries—that the Bible suggests more than one answer, articulating, in quintessential form, two different attitudes. In some respects these attitudes may be felt as contradictory, but they cannot be divorced from each other.

One attitude, and also one answer to our initial question, may conveniently be termed “comprehensive.” It is the attitude that rejects every mimetic image, whatever the figure or object it represents. The classic formulation of this attitude is the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4). The same prohibition is repeated, almost verbatim, in Deuteronomy 5:8. Another passage (Deuteronomy 4:9–20) is so detailed that it has recently been called a “theological exposé.”³ “Only take heed to thyself, and keep thyself diligently,” so the text reads, “lest you corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male and female.” One should not make the image that is “the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that is in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth.”

What these famous statements amount to is a total negation of the image depicting something. The “graven image” and the “likeness” are forbidden, no matter what they depict. It is clear, then, that here the text is not concerned with the image of God, and does not specifically prohibit this specific icon. One notices that in this specific context the danger of idolatry—that is, of worshipping the image of God as if it were the god itself—is not mentioned at all. What is prohibited is the pictorial representation as such, “mimesis,” as a humanistic scholar might have translated it into his or her conceptual vocabulary.

The educated person whom we earlier imagined would of course have known that even in biblical times such a sweeping prohibition of images was not observed. Scripture itself provides ample evidence of frequent violations of this prohibition, many of the violations being sanctioned by the sacred text itself. It will be sufficient to recall the images that dominated the Salomonic Temple, and the shapes of various ritual implements located and employed in the Sanctuary. In reading the biblical description of these implements we encounter a rich natural imagery. The candlestick, for instance, should be patterned like a shaft and branches, each branch with “bowls made like unto almonds, with a knop and a flower” (Exodus 25:31 ff.). In shaping the candlestick the artisan should follow a model: “And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was showed thee in the mount” (Exodus 25:40). Elsewhere in the Bible, a long chapter is devoted to describing the actual temple building, and this description abounds in mimetic imagery. The figures of the cherubim are carved in olive tree wood (1 Kings 6:23). “And he carved all the walls of the house round about with carved figures of cherubims and palm trees and open flowers, within and without” (1 Kings 6:29). The “molten sea” in the temple “stood upon twelve oxen,” and the borders of the bases “were lions, oxen, and cherubim” (1 Kings 7:25 ff.).⁴ The educated medieval person must have noticed that all these mimetic renderings, recorded in great detail, are not rejected and are not critically regarded.

The Bible yields records of artistic representations of various creatures, plants, etc., that suggest a keen observation of nature as well as of the artifact. So far as we can judge, most of these renderings did not serve as ritual implements. Some of them, particularly the images of the fantastic beasts, may have been inherited from rituals performed in the region in prebiblical times, and others probably emerged later, at the time of the Bible itself.⁵

While these detailed records of carved images show that in biblical times the comprehensive prohibition of sacred icons was not (or not fully) observed, the attitude expressed in most of the records indicates that the condemnation survived. Thus Ezekiel copiously describes (8:5–12) the pictorial reliefs at the northern city gate of Jerusalem, but he does so with eloquent disapproval. Representations of beasts and hybrid creatures are found both in the palace area and in private homes, but these violations of the Second Commandment are a grave sin. The reliefs are “the image of jealousy in the entry” (8:5), they are “great abominations,” as “every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel [are] portrayed upon the wall round about” (8:10). By rejecting the representation of natural creatures Ezekiel shows, even if only implicitly, that he accepts the comprehensive interpretation of the prohibition of images. Once again we have to say, no matter what images represent, they violate the Second Commandment.⁶

To our question—what precisely does the biblical prohibition of images prohibit?—the “comprehensive” attitude provides a sweeping answer: any mimetic image, whatever its subject, is banned. But this is not the only answer that biblical texts and traditions yield to the question we have asked. The other answer is more restricted in scope: it does not reject mimetic representation as such; rather, it prohibits the depiction of only one subject—the representation of God. This attitude we may conveniently call the “restrictive” one. The historical impact of this attitude was broader and more decisive than that of the former one, and therefore it will also play a more central role in the chapters of this book.

The limits of the “restrictive” attitude are not clearly laid out in the Old Testament. It is implied suggestions rather than explicit statements that point to the image of God as the principal, or only, subject of the prohibition. Thus we read in Deuteronomy 27:15, “Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the Lord, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and putteth it in a select place; and all the people shall answer and say, Amen.” Here, it seems, the “graven or molten image” is rejected not because it is a mimetic representation of something in nature, but because it is an idol, an object considered to be an image of God. The passionate tone of this statement (and perhaps similar ones) may also be linked with the view that specifically the image of God is here in question. It is the tone that recurs in all later debates about the image of God.

We know today, and it cannot have been lost on the medieval reader, that even the prohibition on portraits of God was not strictly implemented in biblical times. Even if one disregards the classic story of the golden calf (Exodus 22), evidence still remains that certain images were considered divine, and were worshipped accordingly. Ancient Israel was familiar with cult images, and even the virulent condemnation of them attests to an intimate knowledge of how they were produced (Judges 17:3–5; Jeremiah 10:3–9; Isaiah 44:9–20).⁷ We know also what in biblical times were considered the essential parts of an idol. To be complete, an idol seems to have consisted of four parts: (1) pessel was probably the wooden kernel of the whole image; (2) masseha was probably a chased and adorned covering, perhaps often of precious materials (Isaiah 30:22, 40:19; Jeremiah 10:9); (3) ephod was probably an armorlike cloak; and finally there was (4) teraphim, a cultic mask.⁸ All this seems to have been well known in biblical times, and it shows a familiarity with the idol “made by hands.”

As we have said, Christianity was concerned with the “restrictive” attitude; it only marginally touched on the question of whether images as such, regardless of what they represent, are justified, but it devoted a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy to discussing the justification or rejection of the image of God. The student educated in the medieval exegetical tradition may well have noted that the Bible never explicitly says why precisely it is forbidden to represent God, or that no specific reason is given for the Second Commandment. A modern scholar may explain certain confusions, or even contradictions, in biblical language as the result of history. For the medieval student, it goes without saying, such an explanation was altogether excluded. For him, the sacred biblical text emerged from divine revelation, and, as one knows, no historical approach could be applied to the word of God.

Only rarely does the Bible intimate a reason for the prohibition of images of the divine, and even when it does, the wording remains obscure. In the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, a text we have already mentioned, Israel is admonished: “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye dimi...