I have previously discussed some of the biblical and historical evidence against the Second Council of Nicea (787), accepted by both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and its dogmatic teachings on the veneration of images in my article:
One of the greatest evidences against the claim that veneration of images is an apostolic tradition can be seen in the condemnation of the practice at the Synod of Elvira around the year 306. As one historian wrote on this Synod and its decrees on images:
§ 4. But even at this elementary stage of Christian life and worship, difficulties did not fail to arise concerning the adornment of the sanctuaries, and the Synod of Elvira took strong measures to repress some objectionable practices. Images representing the Divine Founder of the Christian faith and his disciples, so far as they existed at an earlier date, were to be found rather in the houses of religious heretics or eclectics than among professed Christians.
Orthodox believers indulged their inclination to religious symbolism, but did not materialise the Divine Nature in artistic representation. In fact up to the present time, between art and the Christian conscience there existed the deepest antipathy and the most irreconcilable antagonism; so that the use of painting and sculpture, if admitted at all, was confined within the narrowest limits. Before the age of Constantine, Christian art had been mean and degraded. Such productions as have been preserved on the gravestones of the earlier church are worthless and cheap, without beauty, grace, or symmetry. "Daubs and smudges" so a great authority informs us, superseded the masterpieces of extinct genius, until the great revival of later years occurred: at present.
Christian art was unworthy of its name, and for its unworthiness was rejected and despised. Gams, indeed, seems inclined even to deny its very existence at Rome, and much more in the provinces, during the first decade of the fourth century; but the view is too extreme, and we may accept Mr. Browning’s lines as a more accurate description of the instinctive habits of the time:
"Love, while able to acquaint her
While the thousand statues yet
Fresh from chisel, pictures wet
From brush, she saw on every side,
Chose rather, with an infant's pride,
To frame those portents which impart
Such unction to true Christian art."
§ 5. But though the description is true in the main there was something more than the 'infant's pride' to determine the preference of the Church. For all aesthetic associations, as we have seen in an earlier part of this essay, were essentially pagan in origin and character; and as primitive Christians rigidly avoided everything connected, however remotely, with heathen worship, and had neither temple nor altar, but a mere house of prayer so pictures and images in like manner, and through the influence of similar associations, were at first excluded from buildings erected for worship. And the abhorrence was the more intense because art as it then existed was pagan, not only in application but in spirit and conception: to have admitted it into the sanctuary would have been to desecrate the purity of the Christian faith.
§ 6. There was another danger which could not be overlooked; the development of an improper hero-worship, to which the admission of images into the churches would have given rise. This tendency to idolatrous worship already needed repression; and without due precaution, not only the dead but the living would have received similar honour in a country predisposed by its antecedents to the adoration of the emperor. This characteristic of religious life in Spain and elsewhere, it must be remembered, had often produced a vehement commotion of popular feeling, always excitable on this point ; so that in the Diocletian persecution it was not an unusual outrage to throw the remains of martyrs into deep wells or into the sea, where their bodies might be secure against all recovery: the object being, as Eusebius informs us, to prevent such men from becoming gods of the Christians; and that they who refuse to worship our gods, may not begin to worship our slaves.
Nor can there be any doubt but that the Mosaic law exerted a most powerful influence in the same direction. The Old Testament Scriptures, which were still the chief subject of Christian study, forbade all works in wood and stone, and on this prohibition great stress was not unnaturally laid. And thus it was, when this restraining force began to lose strength and vitality, and when the danger of relapsing into heathenism and idolatry had apparently disappeared, while on the other hand the spiritual tone and elevation of the Christian community had been lowered, that such representations became universal. Then the craftsmen who had been debarred from the free use of their art, or excluded from the Christian Church, once more found scope for the activity of their genius, and they depicted Christ, his apostles, and his martyrs, in pictures, mosaics, and statues; and not content with these, gave Constantine a position of equal honour.
§ 7. But at present the antipathy was profound, and no objects of worship were allowed to be represented in material forms. Thus Epiphanius tells us how he indignantly rent the curtain of a church in Palestine, because it bore the embroidered image of a saint; and Eusebius of Casarea asks those who admit any portraiture of Christ, what kind of image is that to which they attribute such a name? Is it the true and the unchangeable form of the Divine Son or that which He took with His human nature when for our sake He assumed the semblance of a slave? And he appeals to the universal conscience of the Church, and to its established custom as repudiating and banishing from Christian society all representations of the kind. The Church tolerated symbolism; religious images it abhorred. But it is easy to conceive how symbolic art would develop into a materialised imitation; how the picture of the lost sheep would lead on to that of the Good Shepherd. Nor could productions of this kind be kept within the private houses of Christians, but from the home they would inevitably make their way into the common sanctuary. It was to check such a practice that the Synod of Elvira passed the Canon which has been the centre of almost incessant controversy ever since, declaring that ^^ There shall be no pictures in the church, lest what is Worshipped and adored should be depicted on the walls.
§ 8. The simplicity and directness of the language would seem to leave little room for questioning its meaning. The Canon prohibits the admission of pictures, and by implication, of images into the Church, on the ground that if such representations are allowed to appear within its precincts, the objects of worship and adoration cannot fail to be depicted there, leading to a profane degradation of the Christian faith. The Church wishes to exclude a particular type and to secure the efficiency of the prohibition, the prohibition is made general. It is not with a view of excluding the objects of a false cult, of heathen veneration, that the walls are to be left bare, as one commentator has supposed; not because, if any such pictures were tolerated the great variety of pagan superstition and its objects would render all precautions futile, and entail the surreptitious intrusion of heathenism into the temple of God. It was intended to secure the Church and its worship from within, and from the idolatry not of heathen but of Christians.
§ 9. Persistent and determined attempts have been made by writers of a particular school to limit the application of the Canon; some contending, with Aubespine at their head, that the prohibition refers only to representations of the Divine Being; others, that it applies only to the arbitrary taste and unwarrantable presumption of individuals.
It is, however, impossible to see what justification can be found for the theory which interprets the Canon as a restriction upon an obtrusive ignorance which filled the walls of the Church with frescoes without order, law, or proportion. The injunction is clear and explicit, and the prohibition expressly censures, not the painter, but the picture; censures it, moreover,, on a particular ground, which would not be affected by authorship and artistic skill. The picture was condemned, not for its intrinsic demerit, still less for its origin, but purely and simply for its presence in a particular place, where it might lead to pernicious and lamentable consequences. And although we know that the ordinance was neglected and contested, disobedience does not alter its true significance.
Of the two views mentioned above, the first has the stronger recommendation, though inadequate to secure its acceptance. Aubespine argues, that adoration in the original text can be referred only to the worship of God, and that the prohibition must therefore be confined to representations of the Divine Nature and its attributes. But unfortunately for this theory, the term adoration has the very opposite significance in the language of the empire. It had at first a physical meaning; expressed, in fact, the raising of the hand to the lips of the dependant, and subsequently was specially applied to the semi-religious worship accorded to the Emperor. "Sancti colendi, deus adorandus," as Gams well suggests, in the imperial idiom would be exactly reversed. In the present case, the use of both terms "colo" and "adoro" is decisive against arguments of this nature. It was not merely lest the Illimitable should be limited, and the Spirit materialised, to the surprise and scandal of converts and catechumens; but to ensure that in the sphere of worship there should be neither human nor divine semblance to divert the souls’ homage from its true and lawful object, that this decree was pronounced.
Other interpretations have been suggested, some ludicrous, some fantastic. The dampness of the church walls has been adduced as a cause, and the desecration which would necessarily occur when beams and stones were peeled. An alternative suggestion is, that while images, which are not forbidden by the words of the Canon, could in a time of danger be easily and promptly removed, paintings were fixtures, and must be left to heathen outrage; while such representations would promote caricature of the divine mysteries, always a popular practice among the heathen. Others point to the reserve habitual in the Church, which provoked the common allegation that the Christians concealed the object of their worship, and to their reluctance to reveal the deeper truths of religion even to their new converts. These mysteries, we are told, could not be hidden if they were once depicted on the walls of the building, and artificial covering would be futile.
To examine such theories separately is an unnecessary task, and one which may safely be neglected: tested by the language of the Canon, they all have a false and hollow ring. One point, however, is worth notice, that while the Mosaic law strictly prohibited the use of "graven images," it contained no specific allusion to works of pictorial art. The silence of the Old Testament may have induced rigid literalists to countenance the one form of idolatry, while they lavished their indignation upon the other. This hypothesis may, if well grounded, explain the restricted reference of the ambiguous Canon.
§ 10. There is another Canon, dissimilar indeed to that which we have just been considering, but also having for its aim the protection of the church edifice from practices derogatory to its honour and dignity, and liable to disturb the peace and to debase the elevation of worship. The thirty-sixth Canon guarded against illegitimate adoration; the fifty-second restrains from insult, and punishes in the severest way those who should have been convicted of exposing satires or pasquinades in the church precincts. The exact nature of these compositions cannot be ascertained with any degree of accuracy, but we are justified in assuming that they were scurrilous and profane, corresponding perhaps in kind to the polemical verses which were so popular in the controversies of Eastern Christendom, or to the audacious lines in which Constantine, having outlived his popularity was at Rome in his own city compared to the tyrant Nero. The weapon would be only too serviceable, not only against secular but against ecclesiastical authorities, who were secured against all but covert attack by special safeguards. The Church in this instance inherited the severity of the Roman law, which visited this offence with a capital sentence. Augustus, too, put offenders of this order on the same level as those guilty of high treason; and it was only against the gods, as Augustine ironically suggests, that such licence was enjoyed with impunity. The Church, as well as the emperor, was bent on suppressing a practice which might lead to disorders of the gravest kind." (Alfred William Winterslow Dale, The Synod of Elvira and Christian Life in the Fourth Century: A Historical Essay [1882; repr., Forgotten Books, 2015], 288-97)
