Aniconism is the absence of material representations of the natural world and the supernatural in various cultures. Most denominations of Christianity have not generally practiced aniconism, or the avoidance or prohibition of these types of images, even dating back to early Christian art and architecture. Those in the faith have generally had an active tradition of making artwork and Christian media; depicting God, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, religious figures including saints and prophets, and other aspects of theology like The Trinity and Manus Dei.
Periods of aniconism have characterized various points of Christian history; early Christianity was largely aniconic, with Church Fathers Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria regarding the Ten Commandments to be binding on Christians. Early Christian apologists argued that God was beyond representation "and insisted that material things, unlike divine beings, were subject to disintegration, rust and decay." Marcus Minucius Felix stated that Christians lacked images "because Christians believe in and worship an invisible God." Aniconism was notable during the controversy of the Byzantine iconoclasm of the eighth century, and following the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, when Calvinism in particular rejected all images in churches, and this practice continues today in conservative Reformed (Calvinist) churches, as well as in Anabaptist Christianity. The Catholic Church has always defended the use of sacred images in churches, shrines, and homes, encouraging their veneration but condemning anyone who would worship them as if they were divine themselves.
The use of religious icons and images continues to be advocated at the highest level by religious leaders of major Christian denominations such as some Lutherans, Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics. The veneration of icons is also a key element of the doxology of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church accept the church council which condemned iconoclasm and mandated the use of sacred images, the icons of saints, and the crucifix in churches, public shrines, and in homes. The explanation of the consistency of sacred images with the Christian religion was largely based on the arguments of St. John Damascene.
Modern Anglicanism contains both schools of thought – aniconism and iconodulism. While some Anglicans (typically of the Low-Church variety) maintain the aniconism of the English Reformation, articulated in the religious injunctions of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, as well as the Homily against the Peril of Idolatry and the Superfluous Decking of Churches, other Anglicans, influenced by the Oxford Movement and later Anglo-Catholicism, have introduced the devotional use of images back into their churches.
Christian aniconism has only very rarely covered general secular images, unlike aniconism in Islam; Anabaptist groups such as the Amish are rare exceptions.
Early Christianity
Several voices in early Christianity expressed "grave reservations about the dangers of images",Freedberg, p. 176 though contextualizing these remarks has often been the source of fierce controversy, as the same texts were brought out at intervals in succeeding centuries. Ernst Kitzinger described the mentions of Christian views on Christian images before the mid-6th century as "scattered and spotty",Kitzinger, p. 95 and of an earlier period wrote:
Yet from archaeology it is clear that the use of quite complex figurative Christian images was widespread by that date. There are mentions of images of Jesus from the 2nd century onwards. The Catacombs of Rome contain the earliest images, mostly painted, but also including reliefs carved on sarcophagi, dating from the end of the 2nd century onwards.Jensen, pp. 9–12 Jesus is often represented by pictogram symbols, though he is also portrayed. In the Dura-Europos church, of about 230–256, which of the very early churches surviving is in the best condition, there are frescos of biblical scenes including a figure of Jesus, as well as Christ as the Good Shepherd.
The traditional Protestant position on the history of images in places of worship however is expressed by Philip Schaff, who claimed that:
Paul Corby Finney's analysis of Early Christian writing and material remains distinguishes three different sources of attitudes affecting Early Christians on the issue: "first that humans could have a direct vision of God; second that they could not; and, third, that although humans could see God they were best advised not to look, and were strictly forbidden to represent what they had seen". These derived respectively from Greek and Near Eastern pagan religions, from Ancient Greek philosophy, and from the Jewish tradition and the Old Testament. Of the three, Finney concludes that "overall, Israel's aversion to sacred images influenced early Christianity considerably less than the Greek philosophical tradition of invisible deity apophatically defined", so placing less emphasis on the Jewish background of most of the first Christians than most traditional accounts.Finney, viii–xii, viii and xi quoted Finney also suggests that "the reasons for the non-appearance of Christian art before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other-worldliness, or with anti-materialism. The truth is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital. Art requires both. As soon as they began to acquire land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art".Finney, p. 108
Images were also associated with the idolatry of the pagan Ancient Roman religion and other cults and religions around them, and much early Christian polemic was devoted to attacking paganism for idolatry. In the 1st century the issues are discussed in the Letters of St. Paul and a prohibition of idolatry is included in the Apostolic Decree. The objections to "decorative and symbolic devices, narrative and didactic images", a description that encompasses much though not all of the earliest Christian art, were much less, as these were not plausibly capable of "idolatric abuse"; according to Kitzinger, "much of the art of the Roman catacombs betrays a studied attempt to avoid any suspicion or encouragement of idolatric practices".Kitzinger, p. 89 Jocelyn Toynbee agrees: "In two-dimensional, applied art of this kind there was never any danger of idolatry in the sense of actual worship of cult-images and votive pictures".Toynbee, pp. 294–295; see also Jensen, pp. 13–19 on the types of early images.
In the 4th century there are increased, if scattered, expressions of opposition to images. At the Spanish non-ecumenical Synod of Elvira (c. 305) bishops concluded, "Pictures are not to be placed in churches, so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration", if understood this way, it's the earliest such prohibition known. Though a more formal translation would suggest it is about not having images painted directly into the walls in order to protect them from vandalism. Eusebius (died 339) wrote a letter to Constantia (Emperor Constantine's sister) saying "To depict purely the human form of Christ before its transformation, on the other hand, is to break the commandment of God and to fall into pagan error";David M. Gwynn, From Iconoclasm to Arianism: The Construction of Christian Tradition in the Iconoclast Controversy, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007) 225–251, p. 227. though this did not stop her decorating her mausoleum with such images. By the end of the century Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis (died 403) "seems to have been the first cleric to have taken up the matter of Christian religious images as a major issue".Kitzinger, p. 92 He wrote an appeal to John, Bishop of Jerusalem (c. 394) in which he recounted how he tore apart a curtain hanging on the doors of the church decorated with an image of 'Christ or one of the saints' and admonished the other bishop that such images are "opposed ... to our religion", while also replacing the curtain with another expensively embroidered one. Other writers cited in later controversies were Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Lactantius, although evidence of opposition to images by church leaders is often also evidence of their usage in the church. In the second century Origen of Alexandria opposed the use of images.
It has been suggested that the question of images caused a tension in the early church between a theologically trained clerical elite and the broad mass of followers of the church, and perhaps especially women; the letter of Eusebius being a leading piece of evidence cited here. However other scholars, including Finney and Toynbee,Finney, viii–xii; Toynbee, p. 295 dispute this reading of the documentary evidence, pointing out that the physical evidence of sites such as the Catacomb of Callistus suggests that "church authorities at least tolerated if not approved both the decoration and the content of the iconography on its own property over a fairly long period of time".Jensen, p. 23
There is some evidence that the use of images was regarded as especially characteristic of heretics. Irenaeus, (c. 130–202) in his Against Heresies (1:25–26) says scornfully of the Gnostic Carpocratians, "They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles [pagans]". Irenaeus does not speak critically of icons or portraits in a general sense, only of certain gnostic sectarians use of icons. On the other hand, by the 8th century there is evidence that opposition to images was associated with what was by then the largely vanished heresy of Arianism, though the historical evidence for this now appears slender,David M. Gwynn, "From Iconoclasm to Arianism: The Construction of Christian Tradition in the Iconoclast Controversy", Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007) 225–251 and important early figurative mosaics in Italy were created under Arian rule.
After Constantine However, as Christianity increasingly spread among gentiles with traditions of religious images, and especially after the conversion of Constantine (c. 312), the legalization of Christianity, and, later that century, the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire, many new people came into the new large public churches, which began to be decorated with images that certainly drew in part on imperial and pagan imagery: "The representations of Christ as the Almighty Lord on his judgment throne owed something to pictures of Zeus. Portraits of the Mother of God were not wholly independent of a pagan past of venerated mother-goddesses. In the popular mind the saints had come to fill a role that had been played by heroes and deities."Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (The Penguin History of the Church, 1993), p. 283; Hurlbut, J. L. The Story of the Christian Church. Zondervan, 1967, p. 62; Loverance, Rowena (2007). Christian Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 117. The possibility that Christian art was a movement from below, disapproved of by the clerical hierarchy, vanishes in the large churches built with imperial patronage at the urging of that hierarchy.Jensen, pp. 23–24