Appearance of the Movement.

The emperors of the eighth and ninth centuries initiated and supported the iconoclastic movement; and from the start, issues of both a theological and a non-theological nature were inseparably involved in this imperial policy.

From contemporary sources and modern historical research, three elements within the movement seem to emerge:

a. A Problem of Religious Culture. From their pagan past, Greek-speaking Christians had inherited a taste for religious imagery. When the early Church condemned such art as idolatrous, the three-dimensional form practically disappeared, only to reappear in a new, Christian two-dimensional version. Other Eastern Christians, particularly the Syrians and the Armenians, were much less inclined by their cultural past to the use of images. It is significant, therefore, that the emperors who sponsored iconoclasm were of Armenian or Isaurian origins. Moreover, the non-Greek-speaking East was almost entirely Monophysite by the eighth century and, as we shall see, Monophysitism tacitly or explicitly provided the iconoclasts with the essence of their theological arguments.

b. Confrontation with Islam. After the Arab conquest of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, the Byzantine Empire found itself in constant confrontation militarily and ideologically with Islam. Both Christianity and Islam claimed to be world religions of which the Byzantine emperor and the Arab caliph were respectively the heads. But in the accompanying psychological warfare, Islam constantly claimed to be the latest and therefore the highest and purest, revelation of the God of Abraham and repeatedly levelled the accusations of polytheism and idolatry against the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the use of icons. It was to the charge of idolatry that the Eastern-born emperors of the eighth century responded. They decided to purify Christianity for better withstanding the challenge of Islam. Thus, there was a measure of Islamic influence on the iconoclastic movement, but the influence was a part of the cold war against Islam, not the conscious imitation of it.

c. The Heritage of Hellenic Spiritualism. The controversy begun by Emperors Leo III (717-741) and Constantine V (741-775) seems to have been determined initially by the non-theological factors described above. But the iconoclasts easily found in the Greek Christian tradition itself new arguments indirectly connected with condemned Monophysitism or with foreign cultural influences. An iconoclastic trend of thought, which could be traced back to early Christianity, was later connected with Origenism. The early apologists of Christianity took the Old Testament prohibitions against any representation of God just as literally as the Jews had. But in their polemics against Christianity, Neo-Platonic writers minimized the importance of idols in Greek paganism and developed a relative doctrine of the image as a means of access to the divine prototype and not as a dwelling of the divine himself and used this argument to show the religious inferiority of Christianity. Porphyry, for example, writes,

If some Hellenes were light-headed enough to believe that the gods live inside idols, their thought remained much purer than that [of the Christians] who believed that the divinity entered the Virgin Mary’s womb, became a foetus, was engendered and wrapped in clothes and was full of blood, membranes, gall, and even viler things.¹

Porphyry obviously understood that the belief in an historical incarnation of God was inconsistent with total iconoclasm, for an historical Christ was necessarily visible and depictable. And, indeed, Christian iconography began to flourish as early as the third century. In Origenistic circles however influenced as they were by Platonic spiritualism, which denied a matter of permanent God-created existence and for whom the only true reality was intellectual,” iconoclastic tendencies survived. When Constantia, sister of the Emperor Constantine, visited Jerusalem and requested an image of Christ from Eusebius of Caesarea, she received the answer that “the form a servant,” assumed by the Logos in Jesus Christ, was no longer in the realm of reality, and her concern for a material image of Jesus was unworthy of true religion; after His glorification, Christ could be contemplated only “in the mind.”² There is an evidence that the theological advisers of Leo III, the first iconoclastic emperor, were also Origenists with views most certainly identical to those of Eusebius. Thus, a purely “Greek” iconoclasm, philosophically quite different from the Oriental and the Islamic ones, contributed to the success of the movement.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 443