15-12-2006
Why did
religious images attract so much controversy during the reformation?
In the 16th century,
reformers of Christianity split from the Catholic Church in Western Europe.
It all started with the Augustinian monk Martin Luther (1483 – 1546). He gave
95 arguments for against the use of indulgences as a pardon for sins allowing
the rich to guarantee a place in heaven. His theses were highly controversial
at the time. Despite this, Luther was not burnt for being a heretic but allowed
to present his arguments in front of a court. The printing press brought on the
media who made Luther the centre of religious controversy and sent his message
all over Europe. He questioned the Roman Church and their right to grant
salvation. Martin Luther himself was not against the idea of using religious
images so long as it was still the god they represent that was being
worshipped. In England, the reformation was quite different to the rest of Europe.
It was driven by Henry VIII who created the Act of Supremacy so that he became
the Head of the Church of England. Religious imagery was destroyed as
Protestant reformers such as John Calvin and Andreas Karlstadt supported the
removal of images of god or Jesus. The reformers claimed that the Church had
fallen into idolatry. The destruction of religious icons is known as
iconoclasm. In the words of T.S. Elliot, the reformation left ‘ a heap
of broken images, where the sun beats / and the dead tree gives no shelter’. [1]
“Lord what work
was here! What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls! What tearing
up of monuments! …etc... And what a hideous triumph in the market-place before
all the country, when all the mangled organ pipes, vestments, both copes and
surplices, together with the leaden cross which had newly been sawn down from
the Green-yard pulpit and the service-books and singing books that could be
carried to the fire in the public market-place were heaped together'.” Bishop
Joseph Hall of Norwich.
As Henry VIII’s son Edward
VI came into power in 1547, the iconoclastic reformers were more influential
and a royal injunction was issued were reformers were told to destroy all
shrines, pictures, paintings and all other monuments of miracles so no memory
remains within the walls of the churches or houses.
Although the roots
of iconoclasm go further back than Christianity, within the religion, it is
stimulated by the Ten Commandments. One of the commandments entails the
following “Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any
thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in
the waters beneath the earth:” [2]If
the words are interpreted literally, they are the main justification for
iconoclasm. God by his very nature was beyond representation. Reliquaries which
had veneration powers empowering saints as supernatural beings was also
rejected by the reformers. Another reason was that some of the art was
extravagant not to flaunt the splendour of God but to show the power of the
owner or donor. At the time of the reformation, saint worship and pilgrimages
were especially important as the superstition associated with them was
especially popular. This was strongly opposed by the reformers who destroyed
shrines and any other form of art depicting saints with any superhuman powers.
Instead of worshipping god, reformers claimed that worship was directed towards
the material world.
There was
opposition to the movement as the opposition argued that since God had been
incarnated as Jesus, it was possible to represent him. Another reason they
argued for was that the images were beneficial to the illiterate as they told
stories and helped them understand the religion.The reformers all agreed that
the images of saints should not be worshipped, but they were not so united on
what to do with the existing pieces. This difference of opinion within the
reformers would lead to divisions within Protestantism. While Martin Luther
would rather have had the images removed, Andreas Karlstadt was more
extreme in that he issued an order to the town of Wittenburg to remove all
religious images from churches. Three days after the order was issued, he
complained that the order was not followed and the first iconoclastic riot
began. Karlstadt argued that God was a spirit so attacks on the external being
were pointless. [3] ‘It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail’ John
6.63.[4] In early 1522, Karlstadt wrote “On the Abolition of Images” to
justify the destruction of images. He outlines three things in the document.
Firstly that the images present in houses and churches goes against the first
commandment, idols on altars are worse and that it is therefore right to ban
them. [5] Karlstadt’s main source is the Old Testament, so he denies the
viewpoint that Christ came to abolish the primitive laws of the Old Testament.
Karlstadt provided a very extreme view in that he claimed religious images were
as bad as any of the other commandments such as murder and adultery. He
concentrated more on the Word of God as he believed only the Word could
transcend the flesh. As for the arguments that images provided a gateway for
the illiterate (the argument was called the libri pauperum ictum of Pope
Gregory), Karlstadt said images kept the illiterate ignorant and dependant on
clergy.
There is more to the
iconoclasm of the reformation that simply ridding the religion of images. There
are social and political reasons for the move. The images were a gateway to the
Pope. By attacking the images, the reformers were directly attacking the pope.
The idols did not merely represent false gods, but gods of the Catholic Church
of Rome, and therefore to get rid of the idols was to get rid of the influence
of Rome.
John Calvin was another
big name in the iconoclastic attack on Christianity. He outlines his theory of
worship as – ‘to acknowledge God to be, as He is, the only source of all
virtue, justice, holiness, wisdom, truth, power, goodness, mercy, life and
salvation; in accordance with this, and to ascribe and render to Him the glory
of all that is good, to seek all things in Him alone in every need’. [6]Our
purpose in Calvin’s view was to glorify god through worship and obedience. [7] Calvin
maintains that the only way of worshipping God is through spiritual worship and
this is what justifies his iconoclasm. This is worship without props and other
such human aides. Calvin also maintains that there is a ‘loss of glory’[8] associated
with mixing the spiritual and material in worship.
To conclude,
the iconoclasts were concentrating on the images more than what they
represented during the reformation. For the reformers, abolishing the images
meant more than just ridding the places of worship of pictures, it represented
the break from the traditional bureaucracy of the traditional Church which had
been exploiting the masses. It was a strong force to drive Rome out
of the reformed religion. The legacy of which is every branch of Christianity
today that is not a form of Rome-centric Catholicism.
Bibliography
E. J. Martin, A History of the
Iconoclastic Controversy (1930, repr. 1978)
The Reformation of Images: Destruction
of Art in England, 1535-1660, John Phillips
War Against the Idols: the reformation
of worship from Erasmus to Calvin By Carlos M. N. Eire
De Necessitate, CR 6.460
