Iconoclasm

History

Causes

The commandment is blunt: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image… you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Exodus 20:4–5). For the first three centuries Christians had little church art, and some writers were hostile to it. The argument did not become a crisis until images had become central to popular devotion.

In Byzantium that happened by the seventh century, and the reaction came in 726, when the emperor Leo III published an edict declaring images to be idols forbidden by Exodus 20:4–5 and ordering them destroyed. The destruction of the image of Christ over the palace gate set off riots, and the patriarch Germanus resigned rather than comply (Catholic Encyclopedia, secondary). Leo’s son Constantine V pressed further and gave the position a theology at the council of Hieria in 754, where 338 bishops declared that “the unlawful art of painting living creatures blasphemed the fundamental doctrine of our salvation” (overview, secondary).

Historians now treat the traditional account with care. No iconoclast text survives whole; their arguments are known almost entirely through quotations preserved by their opponents, above all in the acts of the Second Council of Nicaea. Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon’s Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (2011) argues that the scale of destruction and the neatness of the two parties were exaggerated by the victorious iconophile sources.

Influence

Byzantine iconoclasm failed twice. Nicaea II condemned it in 787; it revived under Leo V from 814 and ended in 843, when the empress Theodora restored the icons in an act the Orthodox churches still keep as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. In the West the Frankish court produced its own half-measure in the Libri Carolini (c. 790s), rejecting both the destruction of images and the veneration Nicaea had defined, but Rome’s position prevailed.

The position returned at the Reformation with different arguments and the same text. Andreas Karlstadt’s On the Abolition of Images (1522) triggered the stripping of churches in Wittenberg; Huldrych Zwingli had Zurich’s images removed in an orderly way in 1524; iconoclastic riots swept the Netherlands in 1566. Martin Luther opposed this strongly, holding that images are neither commanded nor forbidden, and the split between Lutheran and Reformed church interiors dates from that disagreement. John Calvin gave the Reformed position its classic form, and through the Westminster standards and the Puritan tradition it shaped the plain meeting house, the blank wall and the central pulpit.

Key ideas and contributors

The commandment is a separate commandment. The Greek numbering of the Decalogue, used by the Eastern Orthodox and Reformed churches, makes the ban on images the second commandment standing on its own rather than part of the first (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2066). The practical effect is that it is recited and catechised as a rule in its own right.

God has no visible form. John Calvin devoted a chapter of the Institutes to the “impiety of attributing a visible form to God” (1.11), arguing from Deuteronomy 4:15–16 that Israel saw no form at Horeb precisely so that it would make none. God’s appearances in signs — the cloud, the smoke, the dove — were temporary and did not license permanent representations.

Images are not books for the laity. Gregory the Great’s defence of images as instruction for the illiterate was the standard medieval argument. Calvin answered it at length in the same chapter, and the Heidelberg Catechism put the reply in its catechism: images may not be tolerated as books for the laity, since God “cannot and may not be visibly portrayed in any way” and wants his people taught by the preaching of his word (Q96–98).

Worship is regulated by command. The Reformed form of the position rests on a wider principle: God may be worshipped only in the ways he has appointed. Whatever he has not commanded in worship is forbidden, which rules out images whether or not anyone intends to adore them. This is the reasoning behind the golden calf, where Aaron made an image and then proclaimed “a feast to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5).

Christ cannot be circumscribed. The Byzantine form of the argument was christological. To paint Christ, the iconoclasts said, is either to depict only his humanity, which divides the two natures, or to claim to contain his divinity in paint, which confuses them. Either way the painter contradicts Chalcedonian Christology. This is the argument Nicaea II was convened to answer.

Other contributors: Constantine V, whose now-lost Inquiries supplied the theological case at Hieria; Karlstadt, whose 1522 tract began Protestant image-breaking; and the Westminster divines, whose Larger Catechism lists making any representation of God among the sins forbidden by the second commandment.

Key controversies

The incarnation. The strongest answer came from John of Damascus: the invisible God has become visible, so what was impossible under the old covenant is now proper. “The honour given to the image passes over to the prototype,” he wrote, borrowing Basil (Exact Exposition 4.16). Iconoclasts replied that the incarnation licensed no such thing, since Christ’s one person cannot be split into a paintable part and an unpaintable one (Icon Veneration).

The cherubim. Exodus itself has God commanding carved cherubim for the ark (25:18–20), and Numbers has Moses making a bronze serpent at God’s word. The Catechism (§2130) makes this its first argument. Reformed writers answer that these were made at God’s express command, were not to be venerated, and that the serpent was destroyed by Hezekiah once Israel burned incense to it (2 Kings 18:4).

Veneration is not worship. Second Council of Nicaea distinguished honourable reverence from the worship owed to God alone (definition), and the Catechism (§2132) repeats it. Iconoclasts and their Reformed heirs reply that the distinction is clear in the textbook and invisible in the shrine, and that the commandment forbids the bowing as well as the making.

Luther against Karlstadt. Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1522 to stop the image-breaking, arguing that the reformers were making a new law where Scripture left freedom, and that hearts, not walls, needed clearing. The Lutheran and Anglican churches kept their art and their crucifixes, which is why the second commandment divides Protestants as much as it divides Protestants from Rome.

Pictures of Jesus. The live version of the dispute among Protestants is whether Christ’s humanity may be depicted at all, in a stained-glass window, a children’s Bible or a film. Strict confessional Reformed churches say no, on the grounds that his person cannot be separated from his divinity. Most Evangelical churches use such images freely while rejecting any veneration of them.

What remains unresolved

Both sides agree that God alone is to be worshipped and that idolatry is the sin the commandment names. They disagree about where an image stops being a pointer and starts being an idol, and whether that line can be drawn by rule or only by the state of the worshipper’s heart. The historical question is also open: with the iconoclasts’ own writings destroyed, what they actually argued is reconstructed from the files of the council that condemned them.