Marcus
Minucius Flex, Octavius
The pagan Caecilius presents many
objections to Christian practices, among them the absence of pictorial
depictions of the Christian deity. He contends that this deficiency is
objectively perverse and incriminating. . . . In reply, Octavius admits that Christians
do not make images of their god but insists that this is not because the deity
is disgraceful but because God is invisible. The Christian god, he continues,
does not inhabit a temple, cannot be contained by any human-made structure, and
cannot be localized in any earthly dwelling. . . . rather than simply claiming
that Christianity’s lack of images and temples demonstrates its rational and
moral superiority, Octavius ridicules visual representations of polytheists’
gods. He declares that is it simple minded to offer prayers or gifts to cult
images and especially to be beguiled by costly or beautiful objects made by
artisans from silver, bronze, ivory, or gold. Worshiping insensate objects
crafted by human hands from base materials subject to ruse and decay is absurd.
Such things can harbor nests of mice and are often covered with spiders’ webs
or birds’ droppings. The idol makers are themselves lewd, depraved, and
immoral. (Oct. 24.5) . . . Perhaps because arguments from Christian
scripture would be unpersuasive to his polytheist rival, Octavius never refers
to the Mosaic commandments against graven images (e.g., Exod 20:4). Somewhat
ironically, he even contradicts Caecilius’s favorable description of monotheistic
Jews worshiping their God with altars and temples. He insists that Jews did so
only in the distant past, before God abandoned them because they had deserted
the Law. (Oct. 11, 33). (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The
Rise of the Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University
of California Press, 2022], 3, 4-5)
Although certainly fictional,
Octavius’s disparagement of polytheists’ cult images aligns with attitudes
widely espoused by early Christian apologists. Like him, they accentuated the
similarity of their views with the negative judgment of philosophers toward
those who paid homage to gods’ statues. And like Minucius Felix’s character,
they rarely called upon biblical condemnation of idolatry or vaunted the
importance of Christianity’s Jewish roots. Even though scattered references to
the Decalogue and a presumed Jewish repudiation of cult images can be found in
the writings of Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen, these were not
major parts of their theological arsenal against idols. (For citations of the
Decalogue, see Clement, Strom. 5.5; Tertullian, Idol. 3.3-4;
Origen, Cels. 4.31; also Firmicus Maternus, Err. prof. rel. 28 [where
he also cites Wis 15:15-17; Ps 134:15-18; Ep Jer 6; Isa 42:17) More often,
second- and third-century Christian writers ridiculed the images of Greco-Roman
gods with tropes similar to Octavius’s. In particular, they mocked polytheists
as gullibly believing that inanimate human-made statues, fabricated by artisans
from base materials (e.g., wood, stone, or metal), deserved any form of
veneration. Also like Octavius, they cautioned that the statues might be contaminated
by malevolent beings.
Christian critics judged that
paying homage to material objects fundamentally misunderstands the difference between
the unstable, sensible realm and the unchanging, intelligible one—it confuses
appearances with reality. Such lack of discernment could be corrected only by
retraining patterns of thought, reassessing the nature of sensory perception,
and cultivating spiritual comprehension. Yet in this view, the problem was not
the images themselves but rather the unwarranted value or intrinsic spiritual
power attributed to them. This attribution was delusional in itself, but the
delusion was compounded because these objects depicted false or powerless gods.
Once again, the gods themselves were not the real problem: devotes endangered
themselves by becoming duped by demons who fraudulently took on the appearances
and names of those (false) gods. (Ibid., 5)
Athenagoras
of Athens (d. ca. 190)
[Athenagoras] castigated those who
venerated images for their failure to distinguish matter from God, the sacred
from the profane, or the created from the uncreated. He contended that things
known only through the bodily senses are utterly different from what is
mentally apprehended, adding that the two are as far apart as artists and their
materials. His sharp critique includes a statement that exemplifies the view
that created matter is fundamentally incompatible with the Divine Being:
Since the multitude, not being
able to distinguish what a gulf there, is between God and matter, approach with
reverence material idols, are we on their account to come forward and worship
their statues when we know and distinguish created from uncreated, being from
non-being, intellect from sense, and give each its proper name? If God and
matter are the same, two names for the one thing, then we are atheists for not
reverencing as gods stones and good, gold, and silver. But if they are utterly
different, as far apart as the craftsman from the materials of his trade, why
are we being accused? . . . Even so, with God and matter, it is not matter that
has the just praise and honour for the arrangement of beautiful things, but its
maker, God. Therefore, if we consider the forms of matter to be gods, we shall
be deemed blind to the true God for equating fragile and mortal things with the
eternal. (Leg. 15)
Athenagoras evidently believed
that his assertion that created matter is incapable of transmitting or representing
the Divine Being also had to account for why images of pagan deities appeared
to make things happen. It is unlikely, he explains, that dead objects can move
themselves; they must have an internal mover. He denies, however that gods
produce these effects in their statues. Like Minucius Felix’s Octavius, he
claims that malevolent spirits usurp the gods’ names and animate these objects.
(Leg. 23) Moreover, he says, these demons receive sustenance by inhabiting
the images. They are eager to attract worshipers to idols because they consume
the blood of sacrificial animals and the fragrant smoke waiting from the roasting
flesh of the latter. (Leg. 26-27) (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to
Icons: The Rise of the Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland,
Calif.: University of California Press, 2022], 6)
Clement
of Alexandria (150-215)
Rather than focusing on objects as
such, he emphasized the problem of ontological misperception, reflecting the
influence of Platonic disparagement of sense knowledge. He argued that since
likenesses are inferior to their models, to regard visual representations as
real—as any sense—is to mistake tangible things for transcendent things. In his
Exhortation to the Greeks, Clement ridicules those who set up blocks of wood
or pillars of stone alone with images of gods in human form and includes a rare
citation of the biblical prohibition against making graven likenesses of
anything in heaven or on earth. (protrep. 4) Here he even appears to
attack all representational art, describing it in Platonic terms as imitative
at best and deceptive at worst. He recognizes that arts can make beautiful
objects but maintains that when beauty is applied to the service of false gods,
it gives these non-existences unjustified and dangerously seductive splendor. (Protep.
4; cf. Plato, Rep. 10) In his treatise The Stromata, Clement
again cites the Decalogue’s prohibition of graven images, explaining that it
was intended to inhibit overattachment to material things and reiterating his
belief that giving homage to sensible things dishonors those that are purely intelligible
and immaterial. (Strom. 5.5) Elsewhere in The Stromata, Clement
cites the commandment against theft rather than the prohibition of graven
images, denouncing those who make images because they steal God’s prerogative
as the unique creator. (Strom. 6.16) Clement then has to explain how
this god, who prohibited graven figures, could have ordered Moses to make two golden
cherubim to guard the Ark of the Covenant (Exod. 25:18-21). These, he asserts,
were merely allegorical figures and not actual beings, whose features were
mystical references to the rational soul and its spiritual repose. (Strom.
5.6) (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the Devotional Image
in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press,
2022], 6-7)
Origen:
[Origen, like Clement of
Alexandria] acknowledged that Jews and Christians are not alone in questioning
the validity of god’s images. IN the first section of is refutation of Celsus,
Origen notes that Celsus regarded Christian attitudes towards idols as
justified but also far from unique, insofar as their arguments against image
worship had already been made by Heraclitus, Zeno of Citium, and others. (Cels.
1.5; see also Athenagoras, Leg. 6). Later in this treatise, Origen
summarizes Celsus’s defense of his coreligionists, Celsus asserts that
Christians have misconstrued the ways that polytheists understand their images
of the gods. Only the most naïve, he insists, see such things as divine in
themselves. He cites Heraclitus (ca. 535-475 BCE), who compared the worshipers venerating
statues to simpletons conversing with walls and not knowing which deities they
address. Celsus then contends that Christians go too far by despising all
images without realizing that such things are merely offerings consecrated to
the gods’ service and vehicles for directing prayers to their depicted deities.
They are not, he insists, deemed to be gods in themselves. Origen responds that
Christians, in fact, do know the god to whom they direct their prayers and that
this god cannot be addressed through images and is utterly unlike the
polytheists’ deities, who are, he maintains merely demons. He adds that those
polytheists who know better but simply pretend to honor the images out of
custom set a bad example and, by so doing encourage ignorant attitudes. (Cels.
7.62, 7.65-66, 8.17-18)
Origen’s exchange with Celsus not
only highlights the nature of the debate but shows that Christian critics likely
understood that it was unjust to characterize polytheistic veneration of images
simply as the unwitting attribution of life or power to insensate and
human-made objects. They appreciated that ancient philosophers argued that
although the images were not in themselves living deities, they were means by which
devotees paid homage to the gods they depicted. Plato put it succinctly: “We
set up statues [of the gods] as images, and we believe that when we worship
these, lifeless though they be, the living gods beyond feel great good-will
toward us and gratitude.” (Plato, Leg. 11.93IAI-4) (Robin M.
Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the Devotional Image in Early
Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2022], 24)
Origen, like Clement, invoked
Jewish reticence about figurative art, citing the biblical injunctions against
idols in his refutation of the earlier polytheist Celsus. There he notes Celsus’s
contention that if, according to Saint Paul, idols were nothing (1 Cor 8:4),
there could be no harm in them. Even if they were actually demons, they would
therefore be God’s creatures and deserve some kind of propitiation. Responding
in terms much like those of Minucius Felix and Athenagoras, Origen maintains
that if idols are nothing, any association with them is liable to mean
association with demons. (Cels. 8.24) These demons, he says, are invited
into gods’ statues through rituals, consecration, or other magical arts. Once ensconced,
they savor sacrificial foods and gratify illicit pleasures. (Ibid., 7)
Tertullian:
In his Apology, Tertullian
also recounts the legacy of ancient Roman aniconism and proposes that
Christians—at least in this regard—are more authentically Roman than the
polytheists he scorns. (Apol. 25) In his Treatise against the Nations,
Tertullian adds that the Roman Senate often prohibited worship of certain gods
and forbade their altars. This he maintains, anti-image attitudes preexisted
Christianity. (Nat. 1.10.41) In his treatise On Idolatry,
Tertullian claims not only that aniconic religions preexisted Christianity but
also that Satan introduced effigies of deities, along with their artificers.
Prior to that, religion did without them. (Idol. 3) (Robin M. Jensen, From
Idols to Icons: The Rise of the Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland,
Calif.: University of California Press, 2022], 30-31)
Despite al this fulmination
against idolatry, Tertullian does not appear to regard most pictorial or
figurative religious artworks as idols per se. Yet he dos judge the producers
of such objects as complicit with idolatry, insofar as their use is potentially
idolatrous, whatever the artisans’ craft (e.g., painting, sculpture, or
weaving) and whether or not the objects have human forms or appearances (e.g.,
portraits of gods): “For it makes no difference whether a modeler forms the
idol, an engraver chisels it out or an embroiderer weaves it, because it is
also not important whether the idol is made of gypsum or colors or stone or bronze
or silver or thread. For since even without an idol there may be idolatry,
certainly, when the idol is present, its material and formal nature makes no
difference, lest one should think that only that must be regarded as an idol
which has been consecrated in human shape.” (Idol. 1.1-3) (Ibid., 8)
Council
of Elvira and Canon 36:
One often noted witness to the
likelihood that Christians owned and even venerated portraits of holy persons
by the fourth century comes from the compiled acts of the Council of Elvira,
usually dated to 300-306. The Spanish regional council dealt with a number of church
disciplinary issues, including a concern about images, addressed by canon 36.
This brief canon simply states: “There shall be no pictures in churches, lest
what is reverence and adored be depicted on walls.” The wording implies not
wariness about art in general and much less about narrative subjects but rather
caution about depicting certain types of figures (i.e., sacred things worthy of
adoration on church walls. The kinds of artworks that would have attracted the
reverence to which the canon refers were most likely frontal portraits of
Christ, the apostles, and other saints. Presumably, at least some Christians
must have been prone to venerating or praying to them, or there would have been
no need for such a ruling. While this might not be direct and early evidence for
a cult of icons as such, concern about such behavior suggests something
similar. (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the Devotional
Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of California
Press, 2022], 93)
Eusebius
of Caesarea
A second commonly cited
fourth-century criticism of images [alongside the Council of Elvira] comes from
another source attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea, a letter in which he replies
to a request from the emperor Constantine’s sister Constantia. She evidently
asked him to provide a portraits of Christ that she could use for her personal devotions.
Although Eusebius seems fairly tolerant of image veneration in his account of
the statue of Jesus with the haemorrhaging woman (explaining that Gentile
converts could be expected to continue with some of their old practices), this
letter expounds a far more negative line, particularly in regard to images of Christ.
Refusing Constantia’s appeal, Eusebius explains that what she wants is
impossible.
Part of his concern was most
likely the fact that images of Jesus are categorically different from images of
saints or biblical characters, insofar as Jesus is divine. Showing almost
prescient cognizance of the complex arguments that would be deployed in Christological
debates of the fifth century, Eusebius framed the problem somewhat like the Apostle
John did in his rebuke of Lycomedes. Portraying only Christ’s external
appearance heretically divides his inseparable human and divine natures.
Because no artist could represent Christ’s invisible, uncircumscribable divine
nature, the portrait would be no more than an inanimate imitation of the
temporally conditioned form he assumed in his incarnation.
What sort of image of Christ are
you seeking? It is the true and unalterable one which bears His essential characteristics,
or the one which He took up for our sake when He assumed the form of a servant?
[Phil. 2:7] . . . Granted, He has two forms, even I do not think that your
request has to do with His divine form . . . Surely then, you are seeking His
image as a servant, that of the flesh which He put on for our sake. But that,
too, we have been taught was mingled with the glory of His divinity so that the
mortal part was swallowed up by Life [2 Cor 5:4] . . . How can one paint an
image of so wondrous and unattainable a form—if the term ‘form’ is t all applicable
to the divine and spiritual essence—unless, like the unbelieving pagans, one is
to represent things that bear no possible resemblance to anything . . .? For
they, too, make such idols when they wish to mould the likeness of what they
consider to be a god or, as they might say, one of the heroes or anything else
of the kind, yet are unable even to approach a resemblance, and do delineate
and represent some strange human shapes. Surely, even you will agree that such practices
are not lawful for us. (Letter to Constantia [PG 20:154])
Toward the end of his letter,
Eusebius adds an interesting detail that echoes one of his passing comments in
the story of the statue at Paneas: that a woman once presented him with a
picture of two men in the guise of philosophers and alleged that they were
depictions of Paul and Christ. Declaring that he had no idea where she obtained
the picture or why she mistakenly believed that it represented the apostle and
the Savior, he reports that he confiscated the offensive object, as he worried
that her displaying it would make others regard her as an idol worshipper. . .
. If it is genuine (or even partly so) and taken together with his mention of
the statue group at Paneas, then Eusebius seems to have been aware that portraits
of Christ and the apostles not only existed but had become objects of devotional
use and actual veneration. (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise
of the Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University
of California Press, 2022], 93-94, comment in square brackets added for
clarification)
Augustine
of Hippo:
In the early fifth century,
Augustine likewise understood that polytheists distinguished between veneration
of an idol and the transfer of honor to the being the idol represented. Still,
he condemned the practice of making images for veneration. In a sermon preached
around 404, Augustine railed against those who think they can fashion images of
the gods, because they demean themselves by worshiping things lower than
themselves. He allowed that these deluded folks believe they can reasonably
defend their practices by distinguishing between the objects and the invisible numinia,
or spirits, of the images. He even offered what he assumed to be their
response: “We too know that idols are empty show; but they are not what we
worship . . . [We worship] the numina of the idols. We do indeed do
homage to what we can see, but we worship what we cannot see” (Serm.
23B). Then, echoing earlier Christian apologists, Augustine retorted that these
so-called invisible numina are not divine beings lying behind the images
but evil demons disguised as gods.
In another sermon, on Psalm 113,
Augustine acknowledges that some polytheists deny that they irrationally
venerate mundane objects. They clam that they are not deluded, that they honor
the deities that the objects represent and now the objects themselves. Nevertheless,
he observes, even people who perceive themselves as above such misconceptions
or interpret these images as mere signs pointing beyond themselves get
entangled in old habits and superstitions. He notes that those who worship a
transcendent body like the sun tend to pray to a statue of Sol. Why, he asks,
would they turn their backs to the actual sun to pray to a powerless object? (Enarrat.
Ps. 113[2]) (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the
Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of
California Press, 2022], 26-27)
The following notes are also important:
The Fourth-Century Material Turn
In recent decades, historians have
applied new methods and theories to the study of the material and visual
dimensions of religious observance. The roles that various kinds of objects,
mages, architectural spaces, and geographical places play in forming concepts
about the divine realm and its degree of accessibility to human perception are
now significant subjects of academic investigation. A crucial development in
fourth-century Christian practice, often referred to as the material turn,
evinces a change in attitude that reconsidered the potential of the external,
sensible world to mediate invisible, spiritual, and divine realities. This
development, what one scholar calls a “shift in . . . sensibility,” especially
credited the sense as reliable faculties for approaching or encountering the
sacred. (Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 3)
Philosophical speculation about
the relationship of form to matter—influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, which
insists that form cannot exist without matter (or soul without body)—was
essential to early Christian doctrine about the goodness of creation and, in
particular, the possibility of bodily resurrection. Nevertheless, the
observable changeability and corruptibility of material things raised doubts
about their worthiness. Platonist assertions that the sensible world is
transient an that the identity and value of physical objects derive from their
timeless and transcendent prototypes underlie Christian denigration of cult
images as futile and misguided. As Athenagoras remarked, those who venerate
images constructed from matter and thus regard matter as divine do not
distinguish God from matter or discern the enormous distance between them. By
contrast, he insisted, Christians do not make the created for the uncreated or
bring for nonbeing, and therefore they refuse to put what which is perishable
on the same plane with that which is eternal. (Athenagoras, Leg. 15)
Thus, early Christian apologists
apparently found little—if any—religious significance in objects fabricated by
human hands from tangible material. Although archaeological evidence shows that
second- and third-century Christians owned and used special buildings, vessels,
books, and even pictorial art in their religious practice, they did not regard
these as conduits for the holy, even if they did not judge them to be
idolatrous. (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the
Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of
California Press, 2022], 143)
Most polytheists undoubtedly
realized that statues were not actually gods even as they may have viewed
certain ones as distinctly venerable, whether by reason of age, beauty, or history.
Although not completely identified with the deities they depicted, these images
testified to their existence. Thus, no simple distinction between
representation and reality is possible, partly because many ancients did in
fact believe that images could mediate the presence of transcendent being and
that these beings were the intended recipients of devotees’ prayers, adoration,
or offerings. The link between the deities and their effigies is complicated.
Even allowing that their circumstances or setting could vary, these images and
the immortals they represent are of different natures, none is made of base
materials, inert, mute, and vulnerable to decay, while the other is immaterial,
transcendent, and eternal. Yet they are united in some sense, insofar as the
model conceptually or symbolically points to the original. (Robin M. Jensen, From
Idols to Icons: The Rise of the Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland,
Calif.: University of California Press, 2022], 19)
Surviving documentary evidence attests
that from the second century CE onward, certain church authorities observed
devotional practices among Christians that, in their judgment, approximated
idolatrous or heretical adoration of holy images. This concern grew more
pronounced in the fourth and fifth centuries, even while many apparently
tolerated narrative iconographic programs in cemeteries and churches. It was,
after all, in the fourth century that portrait-type depictions of Christ, his
mother Mary, and the saints gradually appeared and began to replace the older
narrative subjects. These new types were installed in mosaic on church apses,
woven into curtains, parented on tomb walls, and rendered on portable wooden
panels. With only a few exceptions, they were not three-dimensional figures and
in this respect in particular contrasted with traditional Greco-Roman cult
statues. (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the Devotional
Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of California
Press, 2022], 90)
Even as Christian writers
continued their condemnation of so-called pagan idolatry, a dramatic turn
toward material forms of Christian practice during the fourth century changed
the context as well as the dimensions of the critique. Contemporaneous with the
shift in Christian social and political status during the reign of Constantine
I (306-37 CE). Christians began to make two-dimensional images of Christ and
the saints without narrative contexts, an evolution that corresponds with the
rise of the cult of relics and was possibly directly linked to the visits of pilgrims
to saints’ tombs and sacred places associated with the life of Christ. While
such portrait-type images might not have been worshiped or venerated in the
same manner as pagan cult images, and were almost never statues in the round,
they do point to a change in the ways that Christians appraised the value of
images as instruments capable of facilitating encounters with the holy persons
they depicted. Like the emperor’s portrait set up to act as his representative
presence or the consecrated elements of the eucharist, these images soon served
as means of connecting the pious viewed with their heaven-dwelling or otherwise
absent models. (Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Rise of the
Devotional Image in Early Christianity [Oakland, Calif.: University of
California Press, 2022], xviii-xix)
Further Reading:
Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman
Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons
