Brian Daley,
a Roman Catholic scholar and Jesuit priest noted that:
The early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
traditions of faith all took generally negative positions about the use and
role of religious images in community life . . . (Brian E. Daley, God Visible: Patristic Christology
Reconsidered [Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 233)
While noting
that “visual images did decorate Jewish and Christian places of worship in at
least some parts of the Mediterranean world” (p. 233 [Daley references
Dura-Europas]), with respect to the veneration
of such images, Daley correctly noted that “Jewish artisans were allowed
to make images for non-Jewish consumers, and Jews might even possess images in
their houses, as long as they did not worship them” (p. 234) and that:
Second-century Christian apologists, of
course, like Justin and Athenagoras (Justin, Apol. 1.9, 24; Athenagoras, Plea
for the Christians 17-18; Letter to
Diognetus 2; Theophilus, To the Autolycus
2.2.), drew on the Old Testament to heap what soon became standard on “pagan”
devotional practices, centered on statues and paintings made by human hands.
Clement of Alexandria, generally affirming towards the cosmopolitan culture of
his day, nevertheless insisted that well-formed Christians worshipped a totally
transcendent God without the aid of images (Clement, Protreptikos 4.1; Paedagogos 3.59.2;
Stromateis 5.1, 11-14); the north
African Tertullian, two decades later, contrasted the abstract purity of
Christian worship with the visual luxuriance of pagan idolatry (De Idolatria 3-4, 6, 18, 20). Origen
insisted that not only the incarnation of the Word genuinely succeeded in
making the transcendent God visible (De
Principiis 1.6.4; 2.4.3); otherwise, God’s image in the world was achieved
most fully in the creation and the virtuous life of the human person (Homilies on Genesis 1.13; 4; 13.4).
(Ibid., 234)
Daley then
presents a discussion of two other patristic-era witnesses against the veneration
of images: Eusebius and Epiphanius. While many have called into question their
polemical work against such a practice, Daley notes that “there seems to be no
strong reason to reject them” (p. 238) and, with respect to Epiphanius:
John of Damascus, On the Divine Images 1.25; 2:18 rejects the anti-iconic passages
attributed to Epiphanius as spurious. Some modern scholars have also questioned
the authenticity of these fragments, which—like those of Eusebius’s letter—are mainly
preserved in the acta of the Second
Council of Nicea (787), or in the treatises of Patriarch Nicephorus in defense
of icons. Besides an a priori unwillingness on the part of some to think of
this venerable enemy of heresies condemning the use of images, however, there
seems to be little reason to doubt that this was Epiphanius’s position. (Ibid.,
237 n. 24)
On Eusebius,
Daley noted:
The first extended Christian polemic against
the use of visual images for Christian devotion, however, was the celebrated letter
later attributed to the fourth-century church historian Eusebius of Caesaraea, supposedly
written to the Empress Constantia, the sister of Constantine and wife of his
rival Licinius. The authenticity of this letter, which survives only in large
fragments quoted by the protagonists in the eighth-century iconoclastic controversy,
has frequently been questioned, because it is otherwise unattested in
fourth-century sources and because its argument seems so conveniently to fit
into eighth-century polemics; its language and its theology, however, seem to resonate
remarkably well with the rest of Eusebius’s spiritualizing, Platonically
inspired thought. In these fragments, Eusebius responds to the Empress’s
request for a painted image of Christ—the kind of portrait he elsewhere says he
himself has seen of both Paul and of the Savior (Church History 7.18)—by a detailed but forceful refusal. Assuming
that she cannot be asking for a picture of the Son of God in his true, eternal
identity, which transcends imagining, Eusebius concludes that she is looking
for a depiction of “that image, which he took up for our sakes, when he put on ‘the
form of a servant’” (Letter to Constantia,
sec. I). But even this form, the bishop argues, cannot be drawn by an artist,
since the transfigured human body of Christ, now in heaven as once on Mount
Tabor, radiates heavenly splendor.
Who, then, would be able to draw, with dead
and lifeless colors and lines, the flashes of splendor and glory that shine
forth and burst out of him, since even the holy disciples could not endure
gazing on him when he appeared in this way, but fell on their faces, confessing
that the sight was beyond their endurance? (Letter
to Constantia, sec. IV)
To attempt this would be to try to limit the
transcendent, to grasp the ungraspable; even the pagans—if they are
philosophically sophisticated—know such a project is impossible. Eusebius
continues:
If even among unbelieving Gentiles no one
would, in this way, try to depict that has no resemblance to anything else—as for
example an artist, attempting to draw what has nothing like it, ends up
sketching and sculpting shapes that look like humans, yet are wholly different
[from the gods] (for such are those who form idols, either of what they think
is divine, or of what they call heroes, or of something of this sort, and want
to make images of them, but are unable to draw them or even anything close to
them)—then you will conclude yourself that it is wrong for us, too, to do such things.
(Letter to Constantia, sec. V).
Pictorial representation, as Eusebius
understands it, always attempts to show a link between two different realities—the
original and the attempted copy—that in some respect share the same form. With the divine, no such visual
comparison is possible.
Eusebius goes on to remind the Empress of the
biblical prohibition of venerating “graven images,” which he insists has also
been the universal practice of the Christian Church up to his time. He tells
the story of meeting “a certain woman,” who casually mentioned that she had
pictures of St. Paul and of the Savior, as if they belonged among the sages (ως αν
φιλοσοφους); he
confiscated them, he says, to avoid scandalizing people by seeming to condone
idolatry (Letter to Constantia, sec.
VII). The practice resembles what Gnostics have done, in making portraits of
their own leaders.
For us, such practices are forbidden. When we
confess the Lord our Savior as divine, after all, we are preparing ourselves to
see God, purifying our hearts with all seriousness, so that—in purity—we may
gaze on him; for “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” And
if you think images are really important, besides this, before the face-to-face
vision and sight of our Savior that is to come, what greater portrait could a
person have than the very word of God? (Letter
to Constantia, sec. VIII)
Like his hero Origen, Eusebius seems to assume
what the Word of God became “flesh” in the word of the Bible, before becoming
flesh in the Virgin’s womb. Study the Scriptures, he is urging the Empress, and
you have the only representation you will ever need! (Ibid., 235-36)
With respect
to Epiphanius, Daley wrote:
During the last two decades of the fourth
century, another busy author who was later claimed as a spiritual ancestor by
the opponents of sacred images was Epiphanius, a Palestinian who later became bishop
of Salamis in Cyprus. Learned, but less intellectually subtle than Eusebius,
Epiphanius was essentially a theological polemicist, who served the later
Christian tradition mainly by his careful and detailed descriptions of ancient
Christian heresies. He also seems to have been opposed to the public erection
and veneration of sacred images, on the traditional philosophical grounds of
the essential deceptiveness of artistic representation. A passage from his
letter to the Emperor Theodosius I, probably from around 394, gives a
representative example of Epiphanius’s position:
I beg you, O devout Emperor, enemy of the
wicked: challenge all deviance by the zeal or God that is truly in you, through
your firm legislation—sanctioned by fines, if possible. And I trust that you
can accomplish, by God’s grace, whatever you will. Wherever tapestries are
found, with false pictures on them that nonetheless claim to represent the
Apostles or the prophets or even the Lord Christ himself, they should all be
stripped from the Churches or baptisteries or residences or martyrs’ shrines
where they are hanging, and you should provide them with a poor man’s burial!
What is painted on walls should be whitewashed. And since it will be difficult
to remove that is planned for depiction in mosaics, your God-given wisdom will now
what orders to give; if it is possible to remove them, that would be best, but
if that is impossible, one should imitate the efforts of our forebears, and
never have figures represented in this way again. Our ancestors, after all, painted
nothing but the sign of Christ, the cross, on the doors and everywhere. (This passage
is cited by Nicephorus, in his Challenge
and Refutation 202)
Epiphanius’s main objection to images, in the
anti-iconic passages of his works that survive, also seems to be their lack of
authenticity: they falsify the realities they claim to represent, by relying simply
on the painter’s imagination (Epiphanius, Letter
to Theodosius). In contrast, he argues, the only representation of Christ
and the saints that can lay claim to adequacy is the image offered in the lives
of the people who imitate them (Ibid). Beyond this, the simple sign of the
cross should be enough to satisfy both the need for decoration and the demand
for religious symbolism. As Son of God, Jesus is the very person, “beyond our
grasp” (ακαταληπτον);
so it is strictly impossible to form an adequate image of him, in words or by
any other human art (Ibid). A lifeless portrait cannot take the place of the
living God; so to offer genuinely religious veneration to such an image is
idolatry (Ibid.) (Ibid., 236-37).
Daley is not
the only Roman Catholic who will readily admit that Epiphanius opposed the
veneration of images. As Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid succinctly noted:
[Epiphanius] was not free from all error . .
.[as] revealed by his fanatical opposition to icons. (Patrick Madrid, Any
Friend of God’s is a Friend of Mine: A Biblical and Historical Explanation of
the Catholic Doctrine of the Communion of Saints, 114).
The Roman Catholic
and Eastern Orthodox dogmatic teaching
on the veneration of images being an apostolic tradition is not just simply
without any positive evidence from the earliest centuries of Christianity;
there is a mountain of patristic witness against
such.
