Christianity
Veneration of Images
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, November 03, 2001
Holy Relics
As we shall see, Christians paid much reverence to ordinary pictures “made with hands” (icons), so how much more must they pay to ones “not made with hands”—miraculous ones. Of these there were many that had descended miraculously from heaven, or—like the most famous of all at Edessa—had been produced by our Lord Himself by impressing His face on a cloth. The story of the Edessa picture is the eastern form of our Veronica legend, but usually relics were the most mundane miracles.
In 1106, when Anselm was at Rouen, a disciple called Ilgyrus returned from the crusades with twelve hairs of the Virgin Mary that she had torn out herself in her anguish as she stood by the cross. The patriarch of Antioch had given him them when Ilgyrus had been among the officials there. He avowed them as genuine, according to sacred records. Anselm was exhilarated at the news, and all the clergy of Rouen went in procession to receive the relics. Crines Beatae Virginis (hairs of the Blessed Virgin) were a popular relic which up to a hundred churches claimed to have, but most of her person and items of her clothing were relics somewhere. The official inventory of Royal Westminster Abbey in the fifteenth century copied by Fleet recorded the following gifts:
S Edward, king and confessor, presented many pieces of the dress of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the linen garments which she wove herself, of the window recess in which the angel stood when he saluted her, of her milk, of her hair, of her shoues and of her bead, also the girdle (zonom) which she worked with her own hands and used to wear and which she left to S Thomas at her assumption. King Athelstan gave a certain veil of the Holy Mary the Virgin. Offa, king of the East Saxons, presented a cypress and a piece of her tomb.
The Virgin’s milk is said to be really a mineral exuded from galactite in an Egyptian cave that is traditionally where the holy family stayed while in Egypt. It seems scarcely less fantastic than genuine mother’s milk. Even Jesus’s tears were miraculously preserved by angels, at Selicourt, at Vendôme, at Maximin, at Orleans and elsewhere.
The monastery of St Médard had a milk tooth of the boy Jesus, lost at age nine. The chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum of the basilica of the Lateran bears the inscription in Latin:
Nowhere in the whole world is more holy.
A list of relics held there in the eleventh century was compiled by its deacon:
There is the rod of Aaron which had blossomed, and the tables of the Testament, and the rod of Moses with which he twice struck the flint and waters flowed forth. Also there are relics there of Our Lord’s cradle, and of the five barley loaves and two fishes. Also the table of Our Lord. The cloth with which he wiped the feet of his disciples. The seamless garment which Mary the Virgin made for her son Our Lord Jesus Christ, which at his death the soldiers cast lots for and it was never divided… The purple garment of the same saviour and redeemer. Two phials of blood from the side of Our Lord, etc, etc…
The seamless garment is rivalled by the holy coats at Treves venerated since the time of S Helen which is also the garment that the soldiers gambled over. Another is at Argenteuil, and there are many others, all proudly kept by the ecclesiastical authorities who are therefore perpetuating lies, for, unsurprisingly, none of them have any provenance. Yet naïve believers think they can pray to them and get a direct line to God.
S John the Baptist’s severed head was owned by several churches. His whole right hand too was preserved in Russia. But pope Calixtus III granted an indulgence to the church at Mottisfont which had preserved “the finger of S John the Baptist with which he pointed to the saviour of the human race”. The same finger was on display in Malta, in Bohemia, in Brittany, and many other places. More than thirty nails of the true cross were also on show somewhere or another.
I have no intention of denouncing the veneration of spurious relics as necessarily superstitious. Such relics may be, and in most cases are, exposed and venerated in perfect good faith. God is not offended by a material error inculpably committed.Herbert Thurston SJ, Superstition, (1933)
Indeed, He is not, Father, but it is hard to believe that the hierarchy of the Church allows these “relics” to be exposed while remaining “in good faith”. Father Thurston is introducing a book on superstition which puts him in an embarrassing position vis-à-vis the multitude of relics venerated in good faith by Catholics. His excuse is hypocritical, and, while the Christian imagines God to be good, they will expect Him not to be offended by an inculpable error, but is the error inculpable when God has instructed people not to venerate images and objects in one of His most famous rules to live by—the Ten Commandments? Churches have always led and continue to lead Christians the way that suits them. It is up to individual Christians to make sure they are properly led, and not led by donkeys, or worse still, crocodiles! Hitherto, they always have been.
Protestants in almost modern times are no better than medieval Catholic peasants. William Huntingdon was a well known Methodist revivalist during the Napoleonic wars who bragged on his epitaph that he was a prophet. He had been a coalheaver until he discovered his hectoring gift. When he died in 1813, bits and pieces of tat, said to have been his, were sold as mementoes. His chair fetched sixty guineas, an astonishing amount in those days, twice a labourer’s annual income. Perhaps some Christians still have bits of the coalheaver’s bits of coal on display in their cabinets and chapels!
And people today get excited at mere stories, they make more credible by being called legends, about the Virgin or Joseph of Arimathea landing on our shores and giving rise to dynasties, or founding churches, knowing that churches made claims like those above to bring in the pilgrims for fleecing, and noble houses always liked to justify their privileges by claiming to be descended from gods! Dan Brown turned the church’s own trick to his own advantage. You can never under estimate the public’s intelligence, is the motto of all politicians, media barons, and, now, novelists!
The Principles of Image-Worship
In the Latin Rite, the priest is commanded to bow to the cross in the sacristy before he leaves it to say mass. He bows again profoundly “to the altar or the image of the crucifix placed upon it” when he begins Mass. He begins incensing the altar by incensing the crucifix on it, and bows to it every time he passes it. He also incenses any relics or images of saints that may be on the altar. Always reverence is to be paid to the cross or images of saints.
The Byzantine Rite shows even more reverence for holy icons. They must be arranged according to a systematic scheme across the screen between the choir and the altar that is therefore called “iconostasis” (eikonostasis), “picture-stand”). Before these pictures, lamps are kept always burning. Among them on either side of the royal door, are those of Jesus and His Mother. As part of the ritual, the celebrant and the deacon before they go in to vest bow profoundly before these and say certain fixed prayers, “We worship (proskynoumen) Thine immaculate image, O Christ”, and they too throughout their services are constantly told to pay reverence to the holy icons.
Adrian Fortescue in the Catholic Encyclopedia justifies Catholic veneration of images in this way.
Although no possible circumstances can ever abrogate the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Commandments which express natural law, the Catholic church rejects the First Commandment because it is not a “natural law”.. The Third Commandment that ordered the Jews to keep Saturday holy is abrogated and replaced by another by the Christian Church. Christians are not bound by other “scriptural laws”, to circumcise, to abstain from levitically unclean food and so on. The First was abrogated by the promulgation of the Gospel, Rom 8:1-2; Gal 3:23-5; Acts 15:28-9.
So, in the First Commandment, the Catholic distinguishes the clauses—“Thou shalt not have strange gods before me”, “Thou shall not adore them nor serve them”—which are eternal natural law, from the clause: “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image”. It is not natural law and no one can prove the inherent wickedness of making a graven thing. It no more applies to Christians than the law of marrying one’s brother’s widow.
So argues the Catholic believer. Christians are bound firstly by the natural law that forbids them to give to any creature the honour due to God alone, and forbids the absurdity of addressing prayers or any sort of absolute worship to a manufactured image. Real adoration, supreme worship paid to a being for its own sake only, acknowledgment of absolute dependence on some one who can grant favours without reference to any one else, is what they mean by latreia and they declare emphatically that this kind of worship must be given to God only. It is sheer idolatry to pay latreia to any creature at all. In Latin, adoratio is generally, though not always, used in this sense, though the church distinguished adoration from worship. In English, by adoration, is understood the latreia of the Fathers of the Second Nicaean Council, and now “respect” and “honourable reverence” such as may be paid to any venerable or great person—the emperor, patriarch, and so on are distinguished from this adoration.
This reverence will be expressed in signs determined by custom and etiquette. Outward marks of respect are only arbitary signs, like words, and signs have no inherent necessary connotation. They mean what it is agreed and understood that they shall mean. It is always impossible to maintain that any sign or word must necessarily signify some one idea. Like flags these things have come to mean what the people who use them intend them to mean. Kneeling in itself means no more than sitting. In regard then to genuflections, kisses, incense and such signs paid to any object or person the only reasonable standard is the understood intention of the people who use them. Their greater or less abundance is a matter of etiquette that may well differ in different countries. Kneeling especially by no means always connotes supreme adoration. People for a long time knelt to kings.
The Fathers of Nicaea II distinguish between absolute and relative worship. Absolute worship is paid to any person for his own sake. Relative worship is paid to a sign, not at all for its own sake, but for the sake of the thing signified. The sign in itself is nothing, but it shares the honour of its prototype. An insult to the sign (a flag or statue) is an insult to the thing of which it is a sign, so we honour the prototype by honouring the sign. In this case all the outward marks of reverence, visibly directed towards the sign, turn in intention towards the real object of our reverence—the thing signified. The sign is only put up as a visible direction for our reverence, because the real thing is not physically present. Every one knows the use of such signs in ordinary life.
It is this relative worship that Catholics say they pay to the cross, images of Christ and the saints, while the intention directs it all really to the persons these things represent. The question was settled for Catholics by the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Nothing has since been added to that definition. The customs by which they show our “respect and worshipful honour” for holy images naturally vary in different countries and at different times. Only the authority of the Church has occasionally stepped in, sometimes to prevent a spasmodic return to Iconoclasm, more often to forbid excesses of such signs of reverence as would be misunderstood and give scandal.
The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent (1543) repeats the principles of Nicaea II:
[The holy Synod commands] that images of Christ, the Virgin Mother of God, and other saints are to be held and kept especially in churches, that due honour and reverence are to be paid to them, not that any divinity or power is thought to be in them for the sake of which they may be worshipped, or that anything can be asked of them, or that any trust may be put in images, as was done by the heathen who put their trust in their idols, but because the honour shown to them is referred to the prototypes which they represent, so that by kissing, uncovering to, kneeling before images we adore Christ and honour the saints whose likeness they bear.
It is pure calumny to say that the Pagans worship their idols in a way any different from this. There is no doubt that all educated people had by 500 BC concluded that images were not gods, though they continued to represent them in just the way the Catholics prescribe. Simpler people might have thought otherwise, but simple Catholics think that statues can weep and wink, and such beliefs prove that the wiorshippers see the statues as in some sense alive. In four points, the Catechism of Christian Doctrine sums up the Catholic position:
- It is forbidden to give divine honour or worship to the angels and saints for this belongs to God alone
- We should pay to the angels and saints an inferior honour or worship, for this is due to them as the servants and special friends of God
- We should give to relics, crucifixes and holy pictures a relative honour, as they relate to Christ and his saints and are memorials of them
- We do not pray to relics or images, for they can neither see nor hear nor help us.
It utterly refutes the idea that Catholic Christianity is monotheistic. Monotheism means there is one god only, not that one god is the king of a hierarchy of millions of gods, saints and angels. NeoPagan Nature worship is more monotheistic. There is obviously only one Nature. It is the universe.
Images in Early Christianity
The first Christians were Jews and the Jews strictly followed the commandment that God could not be represented by images. This came to Judaism at its foundation by the Persians, the Persian religion at that time eschewing images and temples. Jews and early Christians allegedly had no altars, no temples, and set up no image or form of any god. So Christianity began by condemning image worship among pagans, especially images of the emperor who increasingly required adoration as a God, as a unifying force in the empire. The Apostolic Fathers (Athenagoras, Theophilus, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, Tertullian, Cyprian) spoke firmly against idols. They denounced not only the worship but even the manufacture and possession of such images. These texts all regard idols as images made to be adored. Origen was proud of Christian aniconism, repudiating graven images as only fit for demons in Contra Celsum, and Irenaeus (H 1:25:6) condemned the followers of Marcellina who painted images and made statues, which they crowned, including images of philosophers like Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, as well as Christ. The immediate expectation of Christ’s second coming would also have made image making unlikely.
From the second half of the first century to the time of Constantine Jewish Christians buried their dead and celebrated their rites in underground chambers, and some of the frescos in the catacombs date to an early time. Jews, especially in the diaspora, decorated their monuments with paintings, even of the human form. Jewish catacombs and cemeteries were decorated with paintings of birds, beasts, fishes, men and women. At Gamart, North of Carthage, a tomb is adorned with carved ornaments of garlands and human figures. In one of the caves are pictures of a horseman and of another person holding a whip under a tree. Another at Rome in the Vigna Randanini by the Appian Way has a painted ceiling of birds, fishes and little winged human figures around a centerpiece of a woman, evidently a Victory, crowning a small figure. At Palmyra a Jewish funeral chamber is painted throughout with winged female figures holding up round portraits, above is a picture in the late Roman style, of Achilles and the daughters of Lycomedes (d 515).
Pagan sarcophagi had been carved with figures of gods, garlands of flowers and symbolic ornament, and pagan cemeteries, rooms and temples had been painted with scenes from mythology. The Christian sarcophagi were ornamented with indifferent or symbolic designs—palms, peacocks, vines, with the chi-rho monogram (long before Constantine), with bas-reliefs of Christ as the Good Shepherd or seated between figures of saints, and sometimes with elaborate scenes from the New Testament, as in that of Julius Bassus. The catacombs were covered with paintings. There are other decorations such as garlands, ribands, stars, landscapes and vines—no doubt having a symbolic meaning.
Perhaps surprisingly, motifs from mythology appear, used in a Christian sense (Psyche, Eros, winged Victories, Orpheus). Scenes from the Old Testament applied to the life of Christ and the Church recur constantly: Daniel in the lions’ den, Noah and his ark, Samson carrying away the gates, Jonah and Moses striking the rock. Scenes from the New Testament are common too, the Nativity and arrival of the Wise Men, Jesus’s baptism, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the marriage feast at Cana, Lazarus and Christ teaching the Apostles. There are also purely typical figures, the woman praying with uplifted hands, harts drinking from a fountain that springs from a chi-rho monogram and sheep, and therefore pictures of Christ as the Good Shepherd, as lawgiver, as a child in His mother’s arms, of His head alone in a circle, of Mary alone, of S Peter and S Paul—pictures that are not scenes of historic events, but simply memorials of Christ and His saints. In the catacombs, few statues appear for a simple reason—statues are difficult and more expensive to make, and cost more than wall-paintings. Eusebius (HE 7:18) describes ancient statues at Caesarea Philippi representing Christ and the woman He healed there (Mt 9:20-2), if he is not mistaken. The earliest sarcophagi had bas-reliefs. As soon as the Church became richer, Christians began to make statues of the same subjects. The statue of the Good Shepherd in the Lateran Museum was made as early as the beginning of the third century. Tertullian confirms that the communion cup had on it a picture of the Good Shepherd. The statues of Hippolytus and of S Peter date from the end of the same century.
In 306 AD, the general synod of the Church of Spain, the Synod of Elvira, a city near Granada, decreed against Christians who relapsed into idolatry, heresy, or sins against the Sixth Commandment. Sacred pictures were obviously used in public worship by the beginning of the fourth century. Canon 34 reads:
It is ordained that pictures are not to be in churches, so that that which is worshipped and adored shall not be painted on walls.
Plainly, some bishops disapproved of the growing cult of images. Bible manuscripts were also often illustrated even before the middle of the fourth century. Clement of Alexandria mentions the dove, fish, ship, lyre, anchor, as suitable devices for Christian signet rings. Augustine disapproved of pictures of the Christian story. Eusebius of Ceaserea (d 340), the Father of Church History, opposed icons. In several Places in his history he shows his dislike of them. They are a “heathen custom”. In reply to Constantia, sister of Constantine, who wanted a picture of Christ, he wrote many arguments to persuade her not to keep any such thing. It was unlawful to possess images pretending to represent the saviour either in his divine or in his human nature. He had even taken away from a lady friend the pictures of Paul and of Christ which she had, to avoid the reproach of idolatry. Epiphanius of Salamis (d 403) tore down a curtain in a church in Palestine because it had a picture of Christ or an apostle. Again it showed pictures were being made. It was used for the burial of a pauper. By the time of Nilus, the disciple of Chrysostom, the cross was being used in some churches as well as various biblical scenes and martyrdoms.
The Arian Philostorgius (fifth century) was a forerunner of the Iconoclasts, as also was the Bishop of Marseilles (Serenus), to whom S Gregory the Great wrote his defence of pictures. In central Syria, Christian art, like Moslem art, developed to great perfection while rejecting all representation of the human figure. The exceptions are few compared with the increasing popularity of images and their worship all over Christendom, but some Christians did oppose the holy icons.
Pain and Humiliation, No Way—Give us Triumph
In the first centuries, Christians seemed reluctant to express the pain and humiliation of the Passion of Christ. Christians were ashamed to admit of Christ’s ignominious history and death as a rebel against Caesar. Christ is shown as splendid and triumphant, but the crucifixion appears scratched by some Pagan soldier in the Palatine barracks showing a donkey. The crowning of thorns appears in the Catacomb of Praetextatus on the Appian way, but by far the the favourite representation is either the Good Shepherd, then Christ showing His power, raising Lazarus, working some other miracle, standing among His Apostles or seated in glory.
After Constantine (306-37 AD), instead of burrowing catacombs, Christians began to build splendid basilicas, adorned with costly mosaics, carving and statues. S Ambrose (d 397) describes in a letter how S Paul appeared to him one night, and he recognized him by the likeness to his pictures! S Augustine (d 430) refers several times to pictures of “our Lord” and the saints in churches, admitting that people even adored them. S Jerome (d 420) says pictures of the Apostles were well-known ornaments of churches (In Ionam 4). S Paulinus of Nola (d 431) paid for mosaics of biblical scenes and saints in the churches of his city, and wrote a poem describing them. Gregory of Tours (d 594) says that a Frankish lady, who built a church of S Stephen, showed the artists who painted its walls how they should represent the saints out of a book. In the east, S Basil (d 379), asked painters to do S Barlaam more honour. S Nilus in the fifth century blames a friend for wishing to decorate a church with profane ornaments, and exhorts him to replace these by scenes from scripture. S Cyril of Alexandria (d 444) was so great a defender of icons that his opponents accused him of idolatry. S Gregory the Great (d 604) always defended holy pictures.
The triumphant Christ remains the norm in the first basilicas, and in countless basilicas in east and west from the fourth century to the seventh. The curve of the apse over the altar was often filled with a mosaic representing the reign of Christ in some symbolic group, on a throne, dressed in the “tunica talaris” and pallium, holding a book in His left hand, with the right lifted up. The group around him varies. Sometimes it is saints apostles or angels (S Pudentiana, S Cosmas and Damian S Paul at Rome, S Vitalis, S Michael). On either side of him might be symbolic figures opf lambs, harts, palms, cities or the symbols of the evangelists.
A typical example of this tradition was the concha-mosaic of old S Peter’s at Rome, destroyed in the sixteenth century, where Christ is enthroned in the centre, bearded, with a nimbus, in tunic and pallium, holding a book in the left hand, blessing with the right. Under His feet four streams arise (the rivers of Eden) from which two stags drink. On either side of Christ are S Peter and S Paul, beyond each a palm tree, the background being sprinkled with stars while above rays of light and a hand issuing from under a small cross suggest God the Father. Below is a frieze in which lambs come out from little cities marked Hierusalem and Betliem at either end towards an Agnus Dei on a hill, from which again flow four streams. Behind the Agnus Dei is a throne with a cross and behind the lambs is a row of trees. Figures of a pope (Innocent III, 1198-1216) and an emperor preceding the processions of lambs were added later, but the essential plan of this often restored mosaic dates from the fourth century.
The Cross
Although pictures of the crucifixion do not occur till later, the cross, as the symbol of Christianity, dates from the beginning. In the catacombs, Christ was never shown hanging on a cross, and the cross itself is portrayed cryptically. The common holy image was of a lamb lying at the foot of the cross. The council of Constantinople, in Trullo in 692 AD, condemned this symbol, ordering that Christ had to be shown in human form in connexion with the cross. In the Egyptian churches the cross was the pagan ankh, a symbol of life, and interpreted as such even by the Christians. Justin Martyr (d 165) describes it in a way that already implies its use as a symbol (Tryph 91). He says that the cross is providentially represented in every kind of natural object—the sails of a ship, a plough, tools, even the human body. According to Tertullian (d c 240), Christians were known as “worshippers of the cross”.
The cross of Constantine and the early Christian emperors was the labarum, the chi-rho, a war standard. But from the time of Constantine, the cross, but not the crucifix, was displayed with pride by some churches. Both simple crosses and the chi-rho monogram are common ornaments of catacombs, combined with palm branches, lambs and other symbols they form an obvious symbol of Christ. After Constantine the cross, made splendid with gold and gems, was set up triumphantly as the standard of the conquering Faith. A late catacomb painting represents a cross richly jewelled and adorned with flowers. Constantine’s “Labarum” at the battle of the Milvian Bridge (312), and the story of the finding of the True Cross by S Helen, gave a fresh impulse to its worship. Religious feeling in the West recoiled from the crucifix as late as the sixth century, and it was equally abhorrent to the Monophysites of the East who regarded the human nature of Christ as swallowed up in the divine.
It appears without a figure above the image of Christ in the apsidal mosaic of S Pudentiana at Rome, in His nimbus constantly, in some prominent place on an altar or throne as the symbol of Christ, in nearly all mosaics above the apse or in the chief place of the first basilicas such as S Paul at Rome, and S Vitalis at Ravenna. In Galla Placidia’s chapel at Ravenna Christ, as the Good Shepherd with His sheep, holds a cross in His left hand. The cross had a special place as an object of worship. It was the chief outward sign of the Faith and was treated with more reverence than any picture. “Worship of the cross” (staurolatreia) was distinct from image-worship, and the milder Iconoclasts in after years made an exception for the cross, still treating it with reverence while they destroyed pictures. A common argument of the image worshippers to their opponents was that they were inconsistent in refusing to worship images because they worshipped the cross.
The cross further gained an important place in the consciousness of Christians from its use in ritual functions. To make the sign of the cross with the hand soon became the common form of professing the Faith or invoking a blessing. The Canons of Hippolytus tell the Christian, “Sign thy forehead with the sign of the cross in order to defeat Satan and to glory in thy Faith”. Origen says people prayed with extended arms to represent a cross. So also to make the sign of the cross over a person or thing became the usual gesture of blessing, consecrating and exorcising. Actual material crosses adorned the vessels used in the liturgy. A cross was brought in procession and placed on the altar during mass. In the sixth century, the First Roman Ordo alludes to the cross-bearers (cruces portantes) in a procession. When Christians began to represent scenes from the Passion, they gave us the earliest pictures and carvings of the crucifixion. The first mentions of crucifixes are in the sixth century. A traveller in the reign of Justinian notices one he saw in a church at Gaza in the west, Venantius Fortunatus saw a palla embroidered with a picture of the crucifixion at Tours, and Gregory of Tours refers to a crucifix at Narbonne. The oldest crucifixes known are those on the wooden doors of S Sabina at Rome and an ivory carving in the British Museum. Both are of the fifth century. A Syriac manuscript of the sixth century contains a miniature representing the scene of the crucifixion. There are other such representations down to the seventh century, after which it becomes the usual custom to add the figure of Jesus to crosses. Images in the East were generally flat, paintings, mosaics and bas-reliefs. Defenders of the holy icons felt that, however justifiable flat representations may be, a solid statue was an idol.
Revering Images
Distinct from permitting images is the question of what signs of reverence, if any, did the first Christians give to the images? The earliest times yield no information. The place of honour Christians give to their symbols and pictures, the care with which they decorated them, argue that they treated pictures of their most sacred beliefs with some reverence, and from this the whole tradition of venerating holy images gradually evolved. The etiquette of the Byzantine court gradually evolved elaborate forms of respect, not only for the person of Caesar but even for his statues and symbols. Philostorgius, who was an Iconoclast long before the eighth century, says that in the fourth century the Christian Roman citizens in the east offered gifts, incense and even prayers to the statues of the emperor. Those who bowed to, kissed and burnt incense to the imperial eagles and images of Caesar—quite unlike their predecessors who we are told would rather die than do it—who paid elaborate reverence to an empty throne as Caesar’s symbol, gave the same reverence to the cross, images of Christ and the altar. In the first Byzantine centuries, traditions of respect grew up that gradually became fixed, and spread in some measure to Rome and the west. Long afterwards the Frankish bishops in the eighth century were still unable to understand forms that in the East were natural and obvious, but to Germans seemed degrading and servile.
To Byzantine Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries, prostrations kisses and incense were the natural ways of showing honour to any one. It applied to civil and social superiors, and even to symbols, giving them honour that was meant for their prototypes. Tradition stereotyped such practices till they became rubrics and part of the ritual. Educated Christians did not confuse the image with its prototype or forget that homage was due only to God—but most Christians at the time were ignorant.
Just before iconoclasm broke out, things had gone far in the direction of image-worship. Only grossly stupid peasants could have thought that an image could hear prayers, but regrettably that is what most of Christendom was. The way some treated their holy icons argues just this. Images had multiplied to an enormous extent everywhere. The walls of churches were covered inside from floor to roof with icons, scenes from the bible and allegorical groups. S Maria Antiqua, built in the seventh century in the Roman Forum, had a systematic arrangement of paintings covering the whole church. Icons, especially in the east, were taken on journeys as a protection, they marched at the head of armies and presided at the races in the hippodrome. They hung in a place of honour in every room and over every shop. They covered cups, garments, furniture and rings. Wherever a possible space was found, it was filled with a picture of Christ, Mary or a saint. The icon seems to have been the channel through which the saint was approached. It has an almost sacramental virtue in arousing sentiments of faith, love and so on, in those who gazed upon it. Through and by the icon, God worked miracles. The icon even seems to have had a kind of personality of its own, inasmuch as certain pictures were specially efficacious for certain graces. Icons were crowned with garlands, perfumed and kissed. Lamps burnt before them and hymns were sung in their honour. They were applied to sick persons by contact, and placed in the path of a fire or flood to stop it by magic. In the natural inference from the words of many prayers of this time would be that the actual picture was addressed.
The Emperor Michael II (820-9 AD), in his letter to Louis the Pious, describes the excesses of the image worshippers:
They have removed the holy cross from the churches and replaced it by images before which they burn incense… They sing psalms before these images, prostrate themselves before them, implore their help. Many dress up images in linen garments and choose them as godparents for their children. Others who become monks, forsaking the old tradition—according to which the hair that is cut off is received by some distinguished person—let it fall into the hands of some image. Some priests scrape the paint off images, mix it with the consecrated bread and wine and give it to the faithful. Others place the body of the Lord in the hands of images from which it is taken by the communicants. Others again, despising the churches, celebrate Divine Service in private houses, using an image as an altar.
The practices described by the emperor can be established by unimpeachable evidence. S Theodore of the Studion writes to congratulate an official of the court for having chosen a holy icon as godfather for his son. John Moschus (d 619), a monk of Jerusalem, in the New Garden, a work long attributed to Sophronius of Jerusalem, tells the story of an old monk at Jerusalem who was much tormented by temptations of the flesh. At last the devil promised him peace on condition that he would cease to honour his picture of the Virgin. He promised, kept his word, and then began to suffer temptations against faith. He consulted his abbot who told him that he had better give way to the fleshly temptation “rather than cease to worship our Lord and God Jesus Christ with His mother”. The Seventh Ecumenical Synod (Nicaea II, 787), while defending the holy images, explained the kind of worship that may lawfully and reasonably be given to them and discountenanced all extravagances.
S Gregory the Great (d 604), in Rome, called the holy images the books of the ignorant. He declared the catholic Church’s position as that images could be used because they taught the ignorant through the eye what they should adore with the mind but are not themselves to be adored. He writes to an Iconoclast bishop, Serenus of Marseilles, who had destroyed the images in his diocese:
Not without reason has antiquity allowed the stories of saints to be painted in holy places. And we indeed entirely praise thee for not allowing them to be adored, but we blame thee for breaking them. For it is one thing to adore an image, it is quite another thing to learn from the appearance of a picture what we must adore. What books are to those who can read, that is a picture to the ignorant who look at it; in a picture even the unlearned may see what example they should follow; in a picture they who know no letters may vet read. Hence, for barbarians especially a picture takes the place of a book.
But in the east, too, Anastasius, Bishop of Theopolis (d 609), who was a friend of S Gregory and translated his Regula pastoralis into Greek, expresses himself in almost the same way and makes the distinction between proskynesis and latreia that became so famous in Iconoclast times:
We worship (proskynoumen) men and the holy angels. We do not adore (latreuomen) them. Moses says, “Thou shalt worship thy God and Him only shalt thou adore”. Behold, before the word “adore” he puts “only”, but not before the word “worship”, because it is lawful to worship [creatures], since worship is only giving special honour, but it is not lawful to adore them nor by any means to give them prayers of adoration.
Iconoclasm
Iconoclasts were Christians in the eighth and ninth centuries who opposed the display of images in Christian worship. The Paulicians, as part of their heresy held that all matter (especially the human body) is bad, that all external religious forms, sacraments, rites, especially material pictures and relics, should be abolished. To honour the Cross was especially reprehensible, since Christ had not really been crucified. Since the seventh century these heretics had been allowed to have occasional great influence at Constantinople intermittently with suffering very cruel persecution. But some Catholics, too shared their dislike of pictures and relics. In the beginning of the eighth century several bishops, Constantine of Nacolia in Phrygia, Theodosius of Ephesus, Thomas of Claudiopolis, and others are mentioned as having these views. A Nestorian bishop, Xenaeas of Hierapolis, was a conspicuous forerunner of the Iconoclasts. It was when this party got the ear of the Emperor Leo III (the Isaurian, 716-41) that the persecution began. Serenus of Marseilles ordered the destruction of images in his diocese, inviting criticism from Pope Gregory, who pointed out that learning from a picture was not the same as worshipping it. The pictures were solely for instructing the minds of the ignorant.
The controversy over iconoclasm began in the tenth year of Leo’s reign (726 AD). The Caliphs of Damascus took seriously the Moslem teaching that images are idols, and tried to stop even non-Moslems like Christians from using them. Leo the Isaurian, the Byzantine emperor, had cruelly persecuted Jews and Paulicians, and was suspected of favouring Islam, Caliph Omar II (717-20 AD) of Damascus having unsuccessfully tried to convert him. But he persuaded him that pictures were idols. He decided the Jews and Moslems would convert to Christianity if Christians eschewed images. Now, Leo came under the influence of the anti-idolatrous sects, such as the Jews, Montanists, Paulicians and Gnostics which abounded in Asia Minor. Images caused superstition, weakness, and division in his empire, and the First Commandment forbade them. Leo began to enforce his idea ruthlessly, but his religious reform was unpopular, especially among the women. Eastern monks were loyal to the Church. Leo therefore persecuted monasteries and tried to suppress monasticism. Supporters of images were mutilated and killed, or beaten and exiled. Italy rose in arms, and Pope Gregory II wrote to Leo blaming his interference in religious matters. Leo pretended to withdraw Illyricum from the Roman patriarchate and to add it to that of Constantinople, and confiscated all the property of the Roman See on which he could lay his hands, in Sicily and Southern Italy. Herer was the beginning of the Great Schism.
The Iconoclasts began to apply their principle to relics also, to break open shrines and burn the bodies of saints buried in churches. Some of them rejected all intercession of saints. In the West, at Rome, Ravenna, and Naples, the people rose against the emperor’s law. This anti-imperial movement is one of the factors of the breach between Italy and the old empire, the independence of the papacy, and the beginning of the Papal States. Gregory II (713-31) already refused to send taxes to Constantinople and himself appointed the imperial dux in the Dukedom of Rome. From this time the pope becomes practically sovereign of the Ducatus. A letter came from the emperor commanding him to accept the edict, destroy images at Rome, and summon a general council to forbid their use. Gregory answered, in 727, by a long defence of the pictures. He explains the difference between them and idols, with some surprise that Leo did not already understand it. He describes the lawful use of, and reverence paid to, pictures by Christians. He blames the emperor’s interference in ecclesiastical matters and his persecution of image-worshippers. Instead of a council, all Leo has to do is to stop disturbing the peace of the Church. The pope would withstand the emperor’s tyranny at any cost, though he his only defence was to pray that Christ would send a demon to torture the emperor’s body that his soul be saved, according to 1 Corinthians 5:5.
The next pope, Gregory III convoked a council of ninety-three bishops, which excommunicated the iconoclasts, and the fleet which Leo sent to retaliate on the Latin peninsula was lost in a storm in the Adriatic. Leo’s son, Constantine V (Copronymus, 741-775 AD), became an even greater persecutor of image-worshippers than his father. In his eagerness to restore the simplicity of the primitive church, Constantine even assailed Mariolatry, intercession of saints, relics and perhaps infant baptism, to the scandal even of the iconoclast bishops themselves. In February 754, Constantine held in the palace of Hieria a council of 388 bishops, mostly of the East, when images were condemned. The bishops at the synod agreed to all Constantine’s demands. They decreed that images of Christ were either Monophysite or Nestorian—they either confounded or divorced His two natures since it was impossible to represent His Divinity. The only lawful representation of Christ was the Holy Eucharist. Images of saints were equally to be abhorred as it was blasphemous to represent by dead wood or stone those who lived with God. Image-worshippers were idolaters, adorers of wood and stone. All images were idols, as shown by Exodus 20:4-5; Deuteronomy 5:8; John 4:24; Romans 1:23-25. Certain texts of the Fathers were also quoted in support of Iconoclasm.
After decrees were published in 754, the destruction of pictures went on with renewed zeal. All the bishops of the empire were required to sign the Acts of the synod and to swear to do away with icons in their dioceses. The Paulicians were now treated well, while image-worshippers and monks were fiercely persecuted. Instead of paintings of saints the churches were decorated with pictures of flowers, fruit, and birds, so that the people said that they looked like grocery stores and bird shops.
In 757, the emperor tried to abolish monasticism. Monasteries were turned into barracks, the monastic habit was forbidden, relics were dug up and thrown into the sea, and the invocation of saints forbidden. In parts of Asia Minor (Lydia and Caria) the monks were even forced to marry the nuns. Constantine’s son, Leo IV (775-80 AD), although he did not repeal the Iconoclast law was much milder in enforcing them. He allowed the exiled monks to come back, tolerated at least the intercession of saints and tried to reconcile all parties. Leo IV’s wife Irene was an image-worshipper. At Nicaea in Bithynia, the place of the first general council, the bishops met in the summer of 787, about 300 in number. The council lasted from 24 September to 23 October. In the fifth session Tarasius explained that Iconoclasm came from Jews, Saracens, and heretics. Some Iconoclast misquotations were exposed, their books burnt, and an icon set up in the hall in the midst of the fathers.
The partisans of image worship were chiefly found in the Hellenic portions of the empire, where Greek art had once held sway. The monks were the chief champions of images, because they were illuminators and artists. They believed the same grace of the Holy Spirit which imbued the living saint remained after death with his relics, name, image and picture. Images were not mere representations, but emanations of the archetype, vehicles of the supernatural personality represented, and possessed of an inherent sacramental value and power, such as the name of Jesus had for the earliest believers. Here Christian image worship borders on the beliefs which underlie magic.
The iconoclasts rejected image worship and religious art altogether. Gnostics, as dualists, rejected the belief that God was made flesh, or died on the cross, and opposed Christian art, relics and cross-worship. Matter was not worthy to embody or reflect spiritual entities denoted by the names of Christ and the saints. Statues of Christ, especially of him hanging on the cross, inspired the greatest horror and indignation. Although the synod of 692 specially allowed the crucifix, Greek churches have discarded it ever since the 8th century. The Monophysites were equally so by reason of their belief that the divine nature in Christ entirely absorbed and sublated the human. They had an effective appeal to the Bible and to Christian antiquity too. These views were entrenched in Egypt, Asia Minor, Armenia, western Syria and the Hauran. In all the remains of the Christian art of the Hauran none shows any human face or figure. This art is mainly geometrical, and allows only of monograms crowned with laurels, of peacocks, of animals gambolling amid foliage, of fruit and flowers, of crosses which are either swastikas of Hindu and Mycenaean type, or so lost in enveloping arabesques as to be merely decorative. Such was the only religious art permitted by the Christian sentiment of these countries, and also of the large enclaves of semi-Gnostic belief formed in the Balkans by the transportation thither of Armenians and Paulicians. The protagonists of iconoclasm in Byzantium came from these lands where image cult offended the deepest religious instincts of the masses. Leo the Isaurian believed like a Paulician, even to the rejection of the cult of Virgin and saints. Constantine V was openly Paulician. Michael Balbus was reared in Phrygia among Montanists. Byzantine garrisons were largely Armenians and Syrians, in whom the sight of a crucifix or image set up for worship inspired nothing but horror. Iconoclasts left an indelible impress on the Christian art of the Greek Church.
Throughout the second Iconoclast persecution S Theodore (Theodorus Studita), Abbot of the Studium monastery at Constantinople (d 826), was the leader of the faithful monks, the chief defender of the icons. His chief point is that Iconoclasts are Christological heretics, since they deny an essential element of Christ’s human nature, namely, that it can be represented graphically. This amounts to a denial of its reality and material quality, whereby Iconoclasts revive the old Monophysite heresy. In 818, the pope Paschal I (817-824) sent legates to the emperor with a letter defending the icons and once more refuting the Iconoclast accusation of idolatry. In this letter he insists chiefly on our need of exterior signs for invisible things: sacraments, words, the sign of the Cross and all tangible signs of this kind. How can people who a admit these reject images?
On 19 February 842, in solemn processions the icons were brought back to the churches. That day, the first Sunday of Lent—the “Feast of Orthodoxy” of the Byzantine Church—was made a perpetual commemoration of the triumph of orthodoxy after the long Iconoclast persecution. So large has Iconoclasm, the last of the old heresies, loomed in the eyes of Eastern Christians that the Byzantine Church looks upon it as a type of heresy in general. The Feast of Orthodoxy has become a feast of the triumph of the Church over all heresies. It is in this sense that it is now kept. The great Synodikon read out on that day anathematizes all heretics—in Russia rebels and nihilists also—among whom the Iconoclasts are only a part. After the restoration of the icons in 842, there still remained an Iconoclast party in the East, but it never again got the ear of an emperor, and so gradually dwindled and eventually died out. Twenty years later the Great Schism began.
The Great Schism between East and West was a spin off of iconoclasm. The antagonism of the people in the west to the iconoclastic emperors led to the whole of Italy clamouring for war. Pope Stephen II nevertheless applied in 753 to Constantine V, chief destroyer of images, for aid against the Lombards, the emperor of Byzantium still being regarded as the champion of the church. Constantine refused, and the pope turned to the Frankish King Pippin. Rome now allied with the Carolingians, and the pope crowned Charlemagne on the 25 December 800. Claudius, Bishop of Turin (d 840), in 824 destroyed all pictures and crosses in his diocese forbade pilgrimages, recourse to intercession of saints, veneration of relics, even lighted candles, except for practical purposes. Many bishops of the empire and a Frankish abbot, Theodomir, wrote against him. He was condemned by a local synod. Agobard of Lyons at the same time thought that no external signs of reverence should be paid to images, but he had few followers. As late as the eleventh century Bishop Jocelin of Bordeaux still had Iconoclast ideas for which he was severely reprimanded by Pope Alexander II.
After the Iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Church in 842 AD settled down again with her images. Without accepting the decrees of the Seventh General Council (Nicaea II, 787)—the last council in which they met in unison before the final schism—no one can be Catholic or Orthodox today. The exuberant use of statues and pictures during the Middle Ages in the west may be seen in any cathedral not stripped of them by Protestants. The Orthodox agree with what Catholics say on venerating images. Any Orthodox Church has a crowd of holy icons that cover the walls and iconostasis. Images and their cult were part of the Faith, and iconoclasm was a heresy condemned by the Church. Nestorians, Armenians, Jacobites, Copts, and Abyssinians fill their churches with holy icons, bow to them, burn incense to them and kiss them, just as do the Orthodox. Still, and especially since Iconoclasm, the east dislikes solid statues. The eastern icon, whether Orthodox, Nestorian or Monophysite, is always flat—a painting, mosaic or bas-relief.
Cathars and Paulicians in the new millennium carried the iconoclastic spirit all over Europe, inspiring Wycliffe and Hus. At the Reformation, the Protestants thought the veneration of images should stop, along with invocing saints and reverencing their relics. But Luther had no sympathy with the iconoclastic outbreaks which then occurred. The Heidelberg Catechism, however, declared that images were not to be tolerated at all in churches.
Images received worship all over Christendom without question till the Protestant Reformers, true to their principle of falling back on the bible only, and finding nothing about them in the New Testament, discovered in the First Commandment, which they called the second, a command not even to make any graven image. Calvinists keep the rule of admitting no statues, not even a cross, fairly exactly still. Lutherans have statues and crucifixes. In Anglican churches one may find any principle at work, from that of a bare cross to a perfect plethora of statues and pictures.
Coronation of Images
The Greek pagans offered golden crowns to their idols as specially worthy gifts. S Irenaeus (d 202) noticed that Christian heretics, the Carpocratian Gnostics, crowned their images. He disapproved of it because they crowned statues of Christ alongside those of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. The offering of crowns to adorn images became a common practice in the Eastern Churches. At Rome, too, a ceremony evolved out of this pious practice. A famous case is the coronation of the picture of our Lady in S Mary Major. Clement VIII (1592-1605 AD) presented crowns, one for Christ and one for His Mother, to adorn their picture, and so also did succeeding popes. These crowns were lost and Gregory XVI (1831-46 AD) determined to replace them. On 15 August, 1837 surrounded by cardinals and prelates, he brought crowns, blessed them with a prayer composed for the occasion, sprinkled them with holy water, and incensed them. The “Regina Coeli” having been sung he affixed the crowns to the picture. The crowns are to be kept by the canons of S Mary Major. The ceremonial used on that occasion became a standard for similar functions.
The chapter of S Peter have had a right to crown statues and pictures of Mary since the seventeenth century. The first case was in 1631. A benefactor left a legacy to perpetuate the custom. They have done so since. Sometimes the pope himself has crowned images for the chapter. In 1815, Pius VII did so at Savona, and again in 1816 at Galloro near Castel Gandolfo.
