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In Defense of Images: Christian Church and Religious “Art”

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Abstract

Early Christianity Was Hostile to Images. So Goes the Standard argument. This presupposition provided another strong argument for the destruction in the sixteenth century. It assumes continuity with Jewish traditions based on the Decalogue that forbade sacred art, like the argument of the Byzantine iconoclasts. Pitting Jerusalem against Athens and Rome, while excluding artisan traditions from the ancient Middle East where Christianity also thrived (Syria, Egypt, Persia, Parthia, or Palestine, for example), this presupposition informed the outbreaks of destruction of religious images and buildings in Western Christianity. Thus, many scholars, like the reformers who wrote against “idolatry” during the Reformation period, at least since the nineteenth century, have argued that early Christians were aniconic. This assumption remains much alive.2 In his 1990 magisterial book, Likeness and Presence, Hans Belting wrote, without any qualifications, as if it were a statement of fact, “We should always keep in mind that in the beginning, the Christian religion did not allow for any concession in its total rejection of the religious image, especially the image demanding veneration.”3

For a picture is provided in churches for the reason that those who are illiterate may at least read by looking at the walls what they cannot read in books.

—Gregory the Great1

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Notes

  1. For the argument for deeply anti-image foundations of early Christianity, see Hugo Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nach den literarischen Quellen (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1917); for the Jewish matrix as the foundation for this anti-image position, see Ernest Renan, Histoire des Origines du Christianisme 7: Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (Paris: Michel Livy, 1863), 539ff. Also, E. Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm,” reviews a number of Christian attacks against images in the first five centuries of Christianity; R. A. Markus, “The Cult of Icons in Sixth-Century Gaul,” repr. from Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1978), pp. 151–57 in From Augustine to Gregory the Great: History and Christianity in Late Antiquity (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), XII; John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (New York: Penguin, 1979); Barnard, Graeco-Roman and Oriental Background of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 51–64, 89–91; Norman H. Baynes, “Idolatry and the Early Church,” in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone, 1955), 116–43.

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© 2008 Brenda Deen Schildgen

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Schildgen, B.D. (2008). In Defense of Images: Christian Church and Religious “Art”. In: Heritage or Heresy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613157_4

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