You shall not make unto yourself any
graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is
in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Exodus
20:4.
I
have always been grateful for this second of the Commandments. It offers me some much-needed
hope. When I stand on the final
day before that awful Judge and He starts running through the list of
undeniable indictments—sassing my mother, brawling with my brother, coveting my
neighbor’s ass (multiple counts), and others worse—I will not be left entirely
without an answer. For though I
have been a miserable sinner sure enough, I have never made a graven image, not
one.
To
be truthful, this rare virtuous abstention has more to do with my artistic liabilities than with any principle of moral theology. When I think of the Nasty Guys of
history I am much more likely to bring to mind such conventional villains as
Vlad the Impaler or Felix Dzerzhinsky than Praxiteles or
Michaelangelo.
Bamyan: not with a whimper but a bang
The first time I paid much attention to the Taliban, at a time when the term was still new to me, was when in 2001some zealots in Afghanistan blew up two ancient sculpted Buddhas of colossal proportion in the boondocks of the Bamyan Valley. I could scarcely believe it; but since then, I have almost become accustomed to this kind of thing. Almost. This past week many of us were sickened to see reports, accompanied by photos or videos, of the purposeful destruction of ancient statuary in an archaeological museum taken over by ISIS militants. Important members of our government still seem reluctant to concede a religious motive to ISIS—the vassals of the Caliph, in their view, simply want to be “extreme”—but it is difficult to identify anything coherent except religious motivation here. And in fact religious iconoclasm has been a serious theme in all three of the big religions coming out of the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
The
Hebrew Scriptures are full of it.
Take, for example, King Asa of Judah (I Kings 15) who “did what was
right in the sight of the Lord….and got rid of all the idols his ancestors had
made.” This righteous monarch
“even deprived his own grandmother Maacah
of her rank as queen mother because she had an obscene object made for
the worship of Asherah: Asa cut it down and burned it in the gorge of the
Kidron.” One way of avoiding idolatrous images to to eschew images altogether. Jewish temples both in
history and the contemporary world are practically void of pictorial images of
living beings. As for the
Christians, the history of their pious vandalism is breathtaking. Happily, serious Christian
iconoclasm seems to appear on the scene only every eight centuries. It is fortunate for the history of
medieval Christian art that the views of the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, who
conducted a great war against images in the first half of the eight century,
did not at that time long prevail.
But they showed up again with a vengeance in the sixteenth century
Reformation, when Protestant zealots in Britain, the Low Countries and
elsewhere set out to demonstrate the purity of their religion amid mountains of
shattered stained glass, the rubble of smashed statues, and the ashes of
incinerated paintings, decorations, and miscellaneous rags of popery. John Lathrop Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, a classic of nineteenth-century American historiography and still a great read, is on the whole an exhilarating chapter in the chronicle of
human freedom. Yet the heroic
historian is practically in tears as he describes the trashing of the churches
of Bruges in 1578. “The riot was
so furious that it seemed, says a chronicler, as if the inhabitants had gone
raving mad.”
Most of us like to think that we are no longer living in the mental world of the sixteenth century. We
can hope that by the time the twenty-fourth century dawns yet cooler heads will
prevail, but who knows? We have
pretty much soured on George Bush’s war in Iraq, but I remember vividly the
enthusiasm with which the nation greeted an episode from the earliest days of
the collapse of the Iraqi defenses in Baghdad. There was in a public square an undistinguished cast metal
statue of Saddam. Angry people
attacked this monument and pulled it down. The tape recording this event was played over and over again
on American television, often with triumphalist news commentary.
What
exactly were Americans cheering?
It cannot have been an endorsement of second-commandment
fundamentalism. Even for the
overwhelmingly Muslim Iraqi mob, for whom a koranic sanction might have
afforded an augmented satisfaction in the act, the toppling of the statue must
have been primarily an act of political symbolism (the destruction of Saddam
Hussein and his regime) rather than of religious enthusiasm (the destruction of
an image).
But
of course it is entirely around the relationship between the image and the
thing represented by the image that the ecumenical history of iconoclasm
turns. Christian theologians
pretty well resolved the question, eventually, by agreeing on a distinction
between two ancient terms for reverence or worship—latria and dulia. Latria is the worship due to God
alone. Dulia is a kind of
secondary or contingent reverence properly directed toward the saints or
sanctified things, including man-made images of them. The special veneration of the Virgin Mary sometimes needed
the special term Hyperdulia. Try to imagine the art of the European Renaissance without the Madonna.
The
words icon and idol, which came into the Latin church vocabulary from the Greek,
were once synonyms meaning a picture or an image. Idol very soon took on the connotation of a particularly
forbidden image and thus became lost to neutral usage. Iconoclasm means breaking up pictures;
idolatry means according latria to an
image (idol). That iconoclasm should
become the redress for idolatry was perhaps inevitable, but its results have
been, indeed continue to be, most unfortunate.
