A sweeping account of the controversies surrounding the worship of
images in the early Byzantine church
In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all
religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that
was later endorsed by a synod of the church in 753 under his son,
Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire
history of Christian art--and of the Christian church, at least in the
East--would have been altered.
Iconoclasm was defeated by Byzantine politics, popular revolts, monastic
piety, and, most fundamentally of all, by theology, just as it had been
theology that the opponents of images had used to justify their actions.
Analyzing an intriguing chapter in the history of ideas, the renowned
scholar Jaroslav Pelikan shows how a faith that began by attacking the
worship of images ended first in permitting and then in commanding it.
Pelikan charts the theological defense of icons during the iconoclastic
controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, whose high point came
in 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea restored the cult of images in
the church. He demonstrates how the dogmas of the Trinity and the
Incarnation eventually provided the basic rationale for images: because
the invisible God had become human and therefore personally visible in
Jesus Christ, it became permissible to make images of that Image. And
because not only the human nature of Christ, but that of his Mother had
been transformed by the Incarnation, she, too, could be "iconized,"
together with all the other saints and angels.
The iconographic "text" of the book is provided by one of the very few
surviving icons from the period before Iconoclasm, the Egyptian tapestry
Icon of the Virgin now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Other icons serve
to illustrate the theological argument, just as the theological argument
serves to explain the icons.
In an incisive foreword, Judith Herrin explains the enduring importance
of the book and discusses how later scholars have built on Pelikan's
work.
