The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (35 page)

Stories multiplied of the use of images as palladia, or magic shields, to
defend cities against attack, and of their “apotropaic” powers to ward off evil. Images became household furnishings, a general “prophylaxis,” for those who could afford them. Constantinople resisted the Avars in 626, an eyewitness recorded, when the patriarch had images of the Virgin and Child painted on the city gates. Miraculous Christ images were commonly paraded around the city to protect it against fire or enemy attack.

As the vogue of image worship grew in the late sixth and seventh centuries the legends grew of images not made by human hands that brought their message direct from God to the viewer. In the town of Izalos the picture showing a miracle performed by the relics of Saint Stephen appeared so speedily after the event that it must have been the work of an angel. Other images were miraculous mechanical impressions of a holy original, such as the face of Christ made by pressing a piece of cloth against His face, or impressions of His arms on the Column of the Flagellation. Such images were common enough to acquire a name of their own—
acheiropoietoi
(“not made by hand”)—which suggested that such an image somehow perpetuated the Incarnation.

Until the late fourth century, images had been justified mainly as educational tools, “the books of the unlearned.” Then, by the late sixth and seventh centuries they became holy in themselves, with a mysterious affinity to whatever they represented. No longer mere channels of knowledge about sacred things, they became sanctified elements in the experience of the holy. These images, Dionysius the Areopagite (
A.D
. c.500) explained, were “the multiplicity of visual symbols, through which we are led up hierarchically and according to our capacity to the unified deification, to God and divine virtue … through visible images to contemplation of the divine.” By the seventh century apologists for images no longer argued on the basis of the needs of illiterate beholders and instead described “the establishment of a timeless and cosmic relationship between the image and its prototype.”

Arguments from analogy became more sophisticated. From the axiom in Genesis (1:27) that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” they moved on to a divine sanction and divine quality in all images. They enlisted the subtle Neoplatonic dogma of a divine essence that appeared in a descending series of reflections, and so eventually in religious images. If the God-made image of man is divine, then may not a man-made image of God also have an odor of divinity? In worshiping images of saints, may we not be glorifying the “house of the Holy Ghost”? Perhaps the artist—no longer the “deceiver” whom the early Church Fathers condemned—was simply continuing the divine acts of creation. If in Christ God became man and so capable of visual representation, did not all pictures teach the doctrine of Incarnation? Was not the distinction between the image and its prototype just another kind of idolatry?

We cannot be surprised that these subtleties troubled the pious and powerful emperor Leo III. A self-made man who had built his reputation by intrigue and military command, Leo III held strong views in theology that he enforced with imperial authority. He forcibly baptized heretics and Jews. His practical interests made him a bitter opponent of the tax-free monasteries that were attracting thousands of able-bodied men into the cloisters. In 726 he opened his Iconoclastic campaign with a flourish—by destroying the mosaic image of Christ over the gate of his own palace. He replaced it with a cross. But the widespread political and economic consequences of his Iconoclasm would be more than he had bargained for. As his campaign against sacred images spread, so too did rebellions of outraged worshipers, such as that in the Cyclades islands in the very next year (727). Monks organized against him. Pope Gregory II (715–31), who had been a prop of the Eastern Empire but could not tolerate this emperor’s authority in the religious sphere, resisted the destruction of religious images in the Byzantine-held areas of Italy. Leo retaliated in 731 by seizing for his imperial treasury the papal taxes (some three and a half hundred-weights of gold annually) on the churches in Calabria and Sicily. The consequences shook Europe, for Pope Gregory II and his successor Gregory III (731–41), turned away from the Byzantine emperor to ally themselves with the Frankish kings.

Until that dramatic iconoclastic act in his own palace Leo III seems to have shared the common faith in images. This change of heart was a surprise, for at Constantinople in 718 he himself had used a miraculous icon of the Virgin to help him hold off the Arab invaders. But his close relations with the Saracens (the nomadic desert peoples between Syria and Arabia) may give us a clue to his violent revulsion against the idolatry of images. His youth in upper Syria had brought him a knowledge of Arabic, in which he seems to have been fluent.

A plausible legend reminds us of the close spiritual affinity of Christian emperors with their Muslim-Arab enemies on the battlefield. This story in the records of the Council of Nicaea in 787, which ordered the worship of images, made the Umayyad caliph Yazid II (reigned 720–24) the first enforcer of Iconoclasm in the Christian churches. The gullible caliph, gravely ill, was approached by a Jewish “magician and fortuneteller, an instrument of soul-destroying demons, a bitter enemy of the Church of God,” who promised him a healthy and prosperous thirty-year reign if he would only destroy every representational painting or image in all the Christian churches. The caliph, accepting the diabolical bargain, “destroyed the holy icons and all other representations in every province under his rule, and, because of the Jewish magician, thus ruthlessly robbed the churches of God under his sway of all ornaments, before the evil came into this land. As the God-loving Christians fled, lest they should have to
overthrow the holy images with their own hands, the emirs who were sent for this purpose pressed into their service abominable Jews and wretched Arabs; and thus they burned the venerable icons, and either smeared or scraped the ecclesiastical buildings.” This experiment in iconoclasm did not fulfil the Jewish magician’s promise. Caliph Yazid was assassinated in 724, only two and a half years after his Iconoclastic edict, and his son ordered the magician put to death for false prophecy. When Emperor Leo III launched his own battle against images in 726, his energetic aide was reported to have the same name as the evil Jewish magician. And a disastrous volcanic eruption seemed to show God’s displeasure at the spreading idolatry.

Leo’s arguments against images revealed a Jewish, and perhaps also a Muslim, influence. To Leo III and his advisers Mosaic law seemed command enough. Still, he waited four years after his symbolic act of 726, and in 730 he issued his edict against all sacred images. At the same time he removed the patriarch of Constantinople, who had been an image worshiper. The party of images, who would prevail and so would write the history, libeled Leo as a burner of books and universities. But the truth seems to be that education improved in his reign. The full fury of theological passion was released by Leo’s Iconoclast son and heir, the able Constantine V (718–775; reigned 741–75). The image worshipers’ nickname for him—Copronymus (“called from dung”)—has stuck in the history books. Despite the libels of the iconodules (image worshipers), neither Leo nor his son was an enemy of music or the arts. They were secular in their preferences, but no more ascetic than the caliphs.

Yet theological and political passions were inseparable. When Constantine V at the age of twenty-one came to the throne in 741, he was challenged by his much older brother-in-law Artavasdos, who seized Constantinople as a restorer of sacred images. It took Constantine two years to recapture the capital, and the rebels inflamed Constantine’s Iconoclasm. Leo Ill’s acts against the image worshipers had been moderate and sporadic, but Constantine became fanatic. His troubles were soon compounded by a disastrous epidemic (745–47) of the bubonic plague. And when there were not enough left alive to bury the dead, Constantine had to repopulate his empire with two hundred thousand migrants from Bulgaria. In his relentless persecution of the “iconodules” he stigmatized the former patriarch as a “wood-worshiper.” In 764–65 he required all subjects to take an oath renouncing images, and he enforced their wholesale destruction. He banned the adoration of relics, forbade the worship of the Mother Mary, and the title of Saint.

To validate his iconoclasm, Constantine summoned a church council in 754 to proclaim that no religious image of any kind would be permitted.
Since Christ had both a human and a divine nature, the council argued, any image of Christ must either be attempting the impossible (depicting the infinite divine nature in finite human forms) or committing a heresy (by showing His human nature alone and so destroying the unity of Christ’s person). But these Iconoclasts had entered the thicket of theology. Entangled in the arcane definitions of Christology, Constantine V, the political autocrat, was no match for the subtle monastic mind. And the long victory lay with the iconodules, the worshipers of images, who provided ever more ingenious compromises between idolatry and Christianity. To the argument that no one has seen God the iconodules retorted: But Christ has come to us in the flesh. The efforts to impose Iconoclasm by force failed, and the victory of images was accomplished by the power of ideas.

When Leo III used the Laws of Moses to forbid religious images, his opponents quickly confuted him with the simple fact that those laws had been revealed long before the divine Incarnation. The coming of Christ, God in human shape, had changed everything. Now the human form was no longer an invitation to idolatry but an avenue to God. By recalling the visible forms of Christ, His Holy Mother, the Apostles and the Saints, worshipers were lifted toward the Highest Truth. This was only their first and most elementary response to the Iconoclasts.

Religious images found their subtle historic champion in a most improbable place. Saint John of Damascus (c.675–c.750) was born into a wealthy Greek-speaking Damascus family known as the Mansour (Victorious or Redeemed). As son of the high official of the Muslim caliph charged with financial administration of the Christian community, he succeeded to his father’s job. For obscure reasons, about 700 he retired to the monastery of Saint Sabbas, near Jerusalem, where he stayed till his death, exerting vast influence on the life of the Church, its theology, its liturgy, its art and music. Though canonized by both the Latin and the Greek churches, John of Damascus has never attained the celebrity among lay believers to which his versatile achievements entitle him. He wrote the hymnology of the Eastern Orthodox Church and is credited with inventing the musical pattern of eight tones used in the Byzantine liturgy. His
Font of Wisdom
became the standard textbook of the Greek Church and a revered source for Thomas Aquinas, refuting the main heresies and expounding the two natures of Christ. And it was his polemical tracts (726–30) that most persuasively defended the need for images in Christianity. Failing to use sacred images, John explained, was actually denying God’s Incarnation in Christ. He led the way, as Jaroslav Pelikan has shown, in Christian theology’s historic transformation of images from idols into icons.

Against the crude dogmatism of the Iconoclasts, John of Damascus defined an image as “a mirror and a figurative type, appropriate to the
dullness of our body.” And he followed the Neoplatonists in treating images as a way of using the senses to rise above the senses, to the eternal world of divine essences. God’s Incarnation in Christ was itself a recognition of the weakness of the flesh, of man’s need for images. The Christian image of Christ, of Mary, or of the Saints was “a triumph, a manifestation, and a monument in commemoration of a victory.” When anyone viewed a sacred image, he participated in the victory of Christ over the demons. “I have often seen those with a sense of longing,” John of Damascus recalled, “who, having caught sight of the garment of their beloved, embrace the garment as though it were the beloved person himself.” Christian worship of icons showed similar affection for the image that was really addressed to Christ Himself. The Christian use of icons was not pagan but simply human.

On the troublesome question of the dual nature of Christ, John again took the offensive. Pictures of the visible Christ could not exist independently of Him any more than a shadow could exist without the form that casts the shadow. Against the Iconoclast argument that an image had to be made of the same substance as the original, he insisted that the image was not “consubstantial” with its original. It was, rather an imitation (or
mimesis
) in the Platonic sense, only a shadow. “Christ,” John of Damascus concluded, “is venerated not
in
the image but
with
the image.”

Constantine V, unmoved by these arguments, tried to enforce his Iconoclast position with his imperial authority. The so-called Seventh Ecumenical Council of Hieria in 754, which corralled 338 bishops to do the emperor’s bidding, formally anathematized John of Damascus, as it proclaimed an iconoclastic crusade. Priests were executed on mere suspicion of being image worshipers, and the Constantinople mob joined with a lynching. Constantine expelled monks and nuns and seized monastic properties, with results favorable to the army and to the economy.

The power of the Iconoclasts was short-lived. When Constantine VI (771–797; reigned 780–97) came to the throne as a child of nine, he was dominated by his power-mad mother, Irene. Using the religious issue to consolidate her power, in 787 she convened the Second Council of Nicaea, which reversed Constantine V’s Council of 754 and glorified John of Damascus. Some 350 Greek bishops and two representatives of the pope resoundingly affirmed the worship of images whose veneration, they said, was “transferred to their prototypes.” The worship of images, they concluded, was not only permitted, it was commanded both by tradition and by theology. The passage in the Book of Deuteronomy that forbade images was followed immediately by a curse on anyone who “dishonors his father or mother” or removes his father’s “landmarks,” in which icons must be included. Since the invisible God had become human and visible in Christ, and the human nature of Christ had been transformed by the Incarnation,
the worship of icons was needed to affirm the true meaning of Christ. So the council affirmed a new Christian epistemology in which the senses were sanctified.