Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 303 - Don’t Picture This - Iconoclasm.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Picture This, Iconoclasm. There is a nice, though presumably apocryphal, anecdote told about Picasso. A man asks him, why don't you paint people the way they really look? The artist asks what he means, and the man opens his wallet and produces a photo, like this picture of my wife, he says. She's remarkably small, says Picasso, and surprisingly flat. The story draws our attention to the fact that an image of something is never exactly like the thing it represents. If you say that a painting is a good likeness of your mother, you don't mean that it resembles her in the way that an identical twin would or a clone in a science fiction film. The picture might be blurry or in black and white, as well as small and flat, yet still seem to capture your mother, even to be your mother in some sense. Thus, if someone sees the picture on your wall and says, who's that, you would just say, that's my mother. Pictures of people also elicit the same emotions that the people themselves would, provoking such responses as kissing the photograph of one's mother, or using the picture of one's enemy for target practice at a shooting range. Yet of course we know that the picture is not genuinely the same as the person. This is why you wouldn't be arrested for attempted murder for shooting at your enemy's picture, and why you don't expect your mom's photo to kiss you back. Here we have one of the central questions of the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics. How exactly do representations relate to the things they depict? In a dramatic example of the way that theological debates can bear on central philosophical themes, it turns out that one of the most interesting pre-modern engagements with this question emerged in Byzantium in the course of the notorious controversy over the veneration of icons. The Byzantines put the point by asking how an image relates to its archetype, for instance a painted icon of a saint and the saint who is shown in the painting. To make a long story short, the iconoclasts, literally the breakers of icons, argued that it is wrong to venerate an image unless the archetype is genuinely present in that image. The supporters of icons, called iconophiles or iconodules, held that the likeness between an image and its archetype does license taking certain attitudes towards the image that we might fittingly take towards the archetype, and that veneration is one such attitude. Now for the not-so-short version of the story. Iconoclasm is usually reckoned to have begun during the reign of Emperor Leo III, who was said to have removed an icon of Christ from a palace gate in 726. Modern scholars have, however, cast doubt on his role, instead giving his son Constantine V the credit or blame for making iconoclasm into a serious official policy. He called together a church council in 754 which set down this policy, and writings ascribed to Constantine himself make the case against venerating images. There is a popular conception to the effect that Leo and Constantine were here imitating restrictions on pictorial art that we find in Islamic culture, but there is little or no evidence for that idea. If Islam played a role, it was by subjecting the Byzantine Empire to a series of military defeats. Clearly, God was angry with the Greek Christians and the question was why. The iconoclast's answer was that the increasingly popular use of imagery in churches and private settings amounted to idolatry. But this was a concern that had emerged long before the 8th century. Back in the 4th century, the theologian Epiphanius of Salamis had already associated paintings with idolatrous practices, remarking, Slightly earlier, a Christian hagiography had its hero remark to someone who venerated an image of John the Evangelist, Yet the use of icons was well established by the time of the Arab conquests. The Church Father John Christostom had one, and in the 6th century Hypatius of Ephesus defended their use among common believers. Christians had to respond when Jews accused them of idolatry, pointing to a passage in the book of Exodus that reads, An interesting document for this interreligious controversy is a dialogue written by Leonsius of Neapolis in the 630s. Arguing against a hypothetical Jewish opponent, Leonsius contends that a picture can serve to prompt memory of the thing depicted, just as a cross can direct our thoughts to Christ. In such cases, the material image itself is not being worshipped. To the contrary, the material object has little or no worth in its own right. As Leonsius says, A first premonition of outright iconoclasm came in a council of 691-692. It accepted the religious use of pictorial representation but introduced certain restrictions, for instance that Christ should be shown as a human and not symbolized as a lamb. The iconoclasm of the middle of the 8th century was far more radical and called for using the cross alone as a symbol of Christ. No longer would it be acceptable to depict him or the saints with material likenesses. As an iconoclast poem put the point, But popular conceptions are again misleading here. When you think of iconoclasm, you probably imagine soldiers or monks rampaging through churches and private homes, defacing or burning every image they could find, in a violent anticipation of the destruction of images that will later be seen in Protestant Europe. In fact, though, the practical effects of iconoclasm were rather limited. For one thing, the movement was mostly limited to Constantinople, and even there, icons continued to hang in churches. Later iconoclasts would offer a compromise that the images could just be put higher up to prevent people from venerating them. What we're dealing with here is not a social struggle with fighting in the streets, but a political and theological controversy among the elite, with several changes of policy over the course of the century. Under the Empress Irene, iconoclasm was reversed in a council held in 787. The Emperor Leo V, who wanted to associate himself with the military successes of the iconoclast Constantine V, reintroduced the policy. Then another female ruler, Theodora, restored veneration of images for good in 843. In the end, iconoclasm was an entirely counterproductive policy. Like most programs of censorship, it merely intensified attachment to the banned artworks, something you can still confirm today by walking to any Orthodox church, where you'll find icons hanging on every wall. For us, of course, the question is not so much the practical effects during and after iconoclasm as the intellectual rationale offered for and against the policy. Constantine and other proponents of iconoclasm like John the Grammarian echoed the complaints made by the Jewish opponent in the dialogue by Leontius. For them, icons were nothing but idols, and venerating them meant worshipping creatures instead of the divine. The iconoclast's distaste for what they called the carnality of physical images is reminiscent of attitudes familiar from late antique Platonism. Particularly striking is a story told about the great Neoplatonist thinker Plotinus. When asked to sit for a portrait, Plotinus refused, arguing that his body was a mere image of his true self. Why would he want a painted image of this image? But the Neoplatonists were simultaneously potential allies for the iconophiles. As pagans, they too wanted to make use of religious art like statues of the gods. The pagan emperor Julian the Apostate had written in defense of this practice, saying, At a theoretical level, the ritualistic use of images and symbols known by pagans as theurgy was already Christianized in late antiquity by the pseudo-Dionysius. He focused not on artworks, but on the sacraments and the use of everyday language for God. Much as the pagans said when defending theurgy, Dionysius argued that it is through earthly means that we imperfect humans can access the divine. So iconophiles, just as much as iconoclasts, could draw on earlier sources for inspiration. The most important authors to write in favor of venerating images were John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, and the patriarch Nikephorus. Since they were on the winning side, we have a much better sense of their arguments than we do regarding the iconoclast side of the story. Indeed, we usually know the arguments of the iconoclasts only because the iconophiles quoted their arguments for the sake of refuting them. For the iconophiles, the first thing that needed to be clarified was that they were not worshipping painted images. Rather, as the Iconophile Council of 787 stated, the icons are objects of veneration. Furthermore, when we do venerate an image, we are doing so because of a relation of likeness between the image and its archetype. Here, strict fidelity is not important. It doesn't matter whether an icon really shows a saint just the way he or she looked, or even whether the painter of the icon was highly skilled. Yet, by offering some degree of likeness, pictures represent their archetypes in a way that a symbol, like the cross, would not. Here, we come back to the question of what exactly representational likeness consists in. The iconoclast position was a stark one. A real image should involve the actual presence of the archetype. Thus, the paradigm and indeed unique case in which we have an adequate image of Christ is the Eucharist, where his body is genuinely present. The iconoclast put this in explicitly philosophical language by saying that the essence of the archetype should be in the image. In the case of a painting, this is simply absent. Thus, John the Grammarian argued on behalf of the iconoclast that a visual representation of a man cannot convey his deeds or character the way that a verbal description of him might do. In light of this, the artwork is just a waste of time. The iconophiles, by contrast, deny that an image needs to share in the essence of the archetype. That would be more like the case of the identical twin or clone I mentioned earlier. We can understand this point better by alluding to the philosophical debate over universals, and in particular the treatment of the issue we find in John of Damascus. For him, the nature or essence of humanity is fully present in every human, with each individual human being a so-called hypostasis of that essence. So here we might translate hypostasis as instantiation. Clearly, this is not what is going on in the case of a visual representation. The photo of your mother is not an individual human, which is why you don't expect it to kiss you back or tell you to clean your room. How then does the image capture the archetype, if not by including the archetype's essence? Here the iconophiles give several answers. John of Damascus considers that the activities of the archetype may manifest themselves in the image, which sounds a bit like the pagan idea of theurgy, since there too the spiritual effects of a higher cause could show themselves in a material thing. Another idea was that the image participates in the archetype, much as Platonists thought that an individual thing participates in a transcendent form, like giraffes in the form of giraffe, or just actions in the form of justice. Perhaps the most fruitful and persuasive idea offered by the iconophiles was that the image and archetype share a name. Here they could look back to a passage from the beginning of Aristotle's categories, which would have been well known to all Byzantine intellectuals since this was a basic textbook for training in logic. There Aristotle wanted to illustrate the concept of homonyms, that is, two things with different natures but the same name. His example, startling in its relevance for the debate over icons, is that a real man and a figure in a painted picture are both called animal, in Greek zōon. Now Aristotle probably meant by this that in ancient Greek the word zōon did mean living thing, that is animal, but it also meant painted image, presumably because living things were such common subjects for paintings. But the passage could easily be taken to mean that, for example, Plotinus the man and a painting of Plotinus made in secret since he refused to sit for the portrait both share the name Plotinus, even though the man and the painting are distinct things with different natures. And this is exactly what the iconophiles wanted to say. Thus, though Theodore the Studite disavowed the use of technical Aristotelian logic in his iconophile writings, both he and Nikephorus helped themselves to the Aristotelian idea that image and archetype are homonyms. Nikephorus added that this is one reason the icon is a more powerful representation of its archetype than a mere symbol like the cross. As we said, you might call a photo of your mother mom, whereas you wouldn't do that with something that merely reminds you of her like her favorite necklace. Here, one can imagine the iconoclast responding that if we want names, then we should just do as they had already been urging and limit ourselves to linguistic representations of Christ and the saints. A written account provides more detail and poses no danger of worshipping, or if the iconophiles insist, venerating, base material things. Some iconophiles effectively refuse to admit this distinction. For instance, Theodore Abu-Qura, a follower of John Damascus who wrote in Arabic to defend the use of images against criticisms from Muslims, said that words are just another kind of icon. After all, Aristotle has taught us that sounds represent ideas the way that a painting represents its subject. For other iconophiles, visual representations offer something that verbal accounts cannot. Nikephorus offered a detailed explanation of the difference. Both writing and painting are forms of representation, but images lead the mind directly to what is depicted. Words, by contrast, require greater degree of interpretation, and for this reason are often the occasion for disagreement and dispute. Of course, Nikephorus did not mean that written accounts are useless, since that would undermine the importance of the Gospels as a representation of Christ. Still, the painting relates to its archetype more intimately than any verbal description can ever do. So far, we've been discussing the problem of icons in general terms. Considering the debate as it would apply to any venerated image, as of a saint. But there were special problems that arose with the depiction of Christ in particular. And here, it is worth recalling that the first image removed by the iconoclast was indeed one of Christ. In his rationale for iconoclasm, the Emperor Constantine argued that painting an icon of Jesus is not just idolatry but also has problematic implications concerning Christology. After all, it is obviously impossible to depict Christ's divine nature in a painting. The icon would only show his human nature and thus divide the two natures that were joined in his single hypothesis according to the orthodox Chalcedonian formula. Alternatively, the painter might suppose that he is managing to depict the divine nature in the act of showing Christ's human form, but that would show that the painter is confusing the two natures, divine and human. Either way, to paint an icon of Jesus is to fall into heresy. Then too, in the Incarnation, Christ was meant to take on and redeem human nature in general, something that cannot be shown by painting his individual human body. To this line of argument, the iconophiles responded that it was Constantine and the other iconoclasts who failed to understand the implications of Christology for artistic representation. It is precisely because Christ was incarnated that we can, in this one case, represent a divine person in an image. Here it was important to insist that Christ remained incarnated, retaining his body even after his crucifixion and resurrection. The iconoclasts, with their platonist scorn for the material, were thinking like Manichaeans or other dualists who despised the physical realm, not realizing that it has been redeemed and even exalted when Christ took on human flesh and retained it forever. This is why he can be circumscribed in the limited form of an image, something Constantine considered impossible for a being whose divinity makes him infinite and thus uncircumscribable. As for the point that Christ redeemed all of human nature, which cannot be shown in a painting of one individual, the iconophiles again refer us to the standard view on universals. Of course, human nature is something general or common, but it can exist only in individuals. We never have access to essences or natures except by encountering them in concrete material things. So, the only way for us to understand the redemption of human nature is to consider that nature as it appears in one particular case, namely in Christ's incarnated form, which is precisely what is shown in the icon. Famously, history is written by the victors, and that tends to go for the history of philosophy too. Given that our evidence is largely from the iconophile camp, and that the iconoclasts are tainted by the lurid accusations thrown at them in iconophile histories—burning the hands of icon painters, tormenting and humiliating monks who refuse to take down their icons, and so on—it is always going to be hard to avoid sympathizing with the iconophiles. But I tend to think that, philosophically speaking, the iconophiles had the better of this debate anyway. It seems just false that a genuine image of something needs to share the essence of that thing. That central question of aesthetics—what does the representation share with its archetype—needs to be answered in terms of likeness or even partial identity, precisely as the iconophiles suggested. Less clear—to me anyway—is whether the iconophiles were right to think that veneration is an appropriate attitude to take towards an image. As we saw at the outset, in some cases it seems natural to treat pictures as an extension of the people they depict, but in other cases it does not. You might kiss a picture of your mom, but you wouldn't buy it a Mother's Day present. Here too, though, I tend to think that the iconophile position fits tolerably well with our intuitions. Indeed, kissing icons is one of the forms of veneration that became standard practice in Orthodox Christianity. Then again, in less technical and less philosophically inspired iconophile literature, we sometimes get the sense that icons were seen as more than just pictures. We hear, for instance, of Muslim invaders stabbing the icon of a saint, which then began to flow with real blood. As one scholar has remarked apropos of this example, But take a deep breath, because next time we'll be enjoying that rarefied atmosphere of learned theological treatises as we turn to one of the early heroes of the iconophile cause. With his defensive images and his authoritative establishment of what would become the accepted Eastern Christian view on a wide range of theological and philosophical issues, he helped to put the Orthodox in the Orthodox Church tradition, despite living outside the Eastern Christian realms in lands dominated by Islam. So all right-thinking people will want to join me as we turn to John of Damascus, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O