The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm

447 Pages·2001·10.777 MB·English

by  Alain Besançon, Jane Marie Todd

THE FORBIDDEN IMAGE

FORBIDDEN
IMAGE
AN
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF
ICONOCLASM
Alain Besançon
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
Alain Besançon is director of studies at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences So­
ciales, Paris, and a widely published author on intellectual history and Russian politics.
Jane Marie Todd has translated a number of major French works, including Brassai’s
Conversations with Picasso (1999), also published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2000 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2000
Printed in the United States of America
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 12345
ISBN: 0-226-04413-0 (cloth)
Originally published as L'Image interdite: une histoire intellectuelle de I'iconoclasme,
© Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1994.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Besançon, Alain.
[Image interdite. English]
The forbidden image : an intellectual history of iconoclasm / Alain Besançon;
translated by Jane Marie Todd.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-04413-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Iconoclasm I. Title.
BR115.A8B4713 2000
291.2'18—dc2i 00-008793
©The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Thought long ago stopped assigning to art the
sensible representation of the divine.
—G. W. E Hegel, Aesthetics

CONTENTS
Introduction I
Part One Iconoclasm: The Ancient Cycle II
CHAPTER ONE The Philosophical Critique of the Image 13
i Preliminaries: “Civil Theology” B
2 Early Philosophy i8
3 Late Philosophy 42
4 The Persistence of the Pagan Image 5*
CHAPTER TWO The Biblical Prohibition 63
i The Prohibition of the Torah 63
2 The Jewish and Muslim Interpretations 73
3 In the Image and Likeness 81
4 The Image of God: Four Church Fathers 86
CHAPTER THREE The Image in Dispute 109
I The Production of Christian Images 109
2 The Icon and Dogma 115
3 Iconoclasm: Pro et Contra 123
4 The Icon 131
Part Two Pax Romana of the Image 147
CHAPTER FOUR The Middle Ages 149
i The Letter to Serenus 149
viii • Contents
2 The Carolini Libri 151
3 Relics 152
4 Bernard and Dionysius 153
5 Bonaventura 155
6 Thomas Aquinas 158
chapter five The Renaissance and the Baroque Period 165
i The Affirmation of Art and of the Artist 165
2 The Support of Ancient Gods 168
3 Around Trent 172
4 The Crescentia Affair 174
5 The Image in Celebration 177
Part Three Iconoclasm: The Modem Cycle 183
chapter six The New Theology of the Image 185
i Three Iconoclasts 185
2 Hegel: Nostalgia for the Image 203
chapter seven The New Theology at Work 227
i The French Exception in the Nineteenth Century 227
2 Nineteenth-Century Religious Art 258
3 Symbolist Religiosity 294
chapter eight The Russian Revolution 319
i Russia’s Aesthetic Education 319
2 The Spiritual: Kandinsky 330
3 The Supreme: Malevich 357
Postscript 373
CONCLUSION 378
Notes 383
Index 409
Plates follow page 216
INTRODUCTION
Because this book has taken on greater scope than I expected, let me set out its
argument and major theses.
My plan was to write the history of the representation of the divine. I limited
the inquiry to European civilization. I did not delve into the history of plastic
forms, which is a matter of art history. I simply sought to retrace the history of
doctrines and ideas having to do with divine representation, and, more pre­
cisely, of those doctrines and ideas that permitted or prohibited it.
That history seems to have unfolded as follows.
In the beginning, there was Greece, and a condition of innocence. Like Egypt
and Mesopotamia before it, Greece gave a form to its gods. Yet even while Greek
religious art was asserting itself, developing, and moving toward its perfection,
one faction of Hellenism—philosophy, which was also a religious faction—was
beginning to reflect on representation, to assess its agreement or disagreement
with the civic notion of the divine and the accepted forms of representing it.
With philosophy, then, a cycle opened that would subsequendy be called “icon­
oclastic.” The pre-Socratics had a conception of the divine that did not coincide
with mythology, not even with Homers reformed mythology. Plato gave the
theme such profound importance that its repercussions can still be felt today.
His posterity put forward two contrary imperatives, postulated two incoercible
facts about our nature: first, that we must look toward the divine, that it alone is
worth contemplating; and, second, that representing it is futile, sacrilegious, in­
conceivable.
2 • Introduction
Such a powerful idea might have led to the destruction of images. But that
was not the case. Philosophy was an elitist movement and had no hold on the
life of the commonwealth, which continued to produce images in abundance—
even though the initial fire that had created and metamorphosed forms in the
golden age seems to have grown cold rather quickly. And philosophy itself did
not speak with a unanimous voice. Aristotle placed artistic labor within a cos­
mic framework, where it partook of a certain divine dignity. The Stoic move­
ment, which had some qualms about breaking ranks with the spiritual forces of
the commonwealth, accepted a moral interpretation of images; as a result, its
doctrine did not oppose civic religion or its plastic manifestations. Spirituality,
which had a magical component and was less removed from the popular
conception of a certain vulgar Platonism, also sought a compromise with the
image. And, last, the imperial cult imposed its obligatory ubiquity in the matter
of worship throughout the ecumene, based on a living, divine image, namely,
that of the emperor. Philosophical thought and civic religion were urgently and
conjointly summoned to the foot of the altar, on which the image of the impe­
rial and political god stood.
At this point, I move to a different world to consider Israel. Two contradic­
tory themes, point and counterpoint, are developed in the Old Testament: the
absolute prohibition of images and the assertion that images of God exist. I an­
alyze the major biblical texts and compare the Jewish interpretation to the Mus­
lim. Even though they agree that images should be banished, it seems to me that
the reasons for that banishment are not the same in Judaism and Islam. For Is­
lam, it is Gods insurmountable distance that renders impossible the fabrication
of an image worthy of its object; for Judaism, it is Gods intimate familiarity.
The two worlds meet with the coming of Christ to Israel, and the conquest
by Christianity of Roman society and then of the Roman state. That state in­
herited both the biblical pronouncements regarding the invisible nature of the
divine and the assertion that man was created in Gods image. That claim be­
came central because Christ, who is God, is a visible man. He declared: “He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father.” And so it was that, succinctly but for all
time, the points of reference were set down from which the theology of the im­
age was elaborated: the Hellenic ideas conveyed by the Greek vocabulary of the
Septuagint; and the Hellenized Judaism of the last books of the Bible, that is,
the Gospel of John and Saint Paul s epistles.
All this is theology: art is not yet at issue. But the theology of the church fa­
thers, governing every image yet to be made, set the conditions of possibility or
impossibility for the divine image, for the material artwork in which that image