Iconoclasm and Iconoclash (Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series)

Iconoclasm and Iconoclash

Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series Editorial Board

David Golinkin, Marcel Poorthuis Joshua Schwartz, Freek van der Steen Advisory Board

Yehoyada Amir, David Berger, Shaye Cohen Judith Frishman, Martin Goodman Clemens Leonhard, Tobias Nicklas, Eyal Regev Gerard Rouwhorst, Seth Schwartz, Yossi Turner

VOLUME 14

Iconoclasm and Iconoclash Struggle for Religious Identity Second Conference of Church Historians Utrecht University of Tilburg: Faculty of Catholic Theology Theology Department of Utrecht University

Edited by

Willem van Asselt Paul van Geest Daniela Müller Theo Salemink

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

Bar-Ilan University, Israel University of Tilburg: Faculty of Catholic Theology, The Netherlands Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Israel Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, Israel The editors gratefully acknowledge the nancial support by the Netherlands Organization for Scientic Research (NWO) and the Radboud Foundation. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Iconoclasm and iconoclash : struggle for religious identity / edited by Willem van Asselt . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — ( Jewish and Christian perspectives series ; v. 14) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-16195-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Iconoclasm. 2. Idols and images—Worship. 3. Signs and symbols. 4. Symbolism. 5. Identication (Religion) I. Asselt, W. J. van. II. Title. BL603.I26 2007 202’.18—dc22 2007032829

ISSN 1388-2074 ISBN 978 90 04 16195 5 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................ Willem van Asselt, Paul van Geest, Daniela Müller, Theo Salemink

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PART ONE

WORD AND IMAGE: FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 1. The Tension Between Word and Image in Christianity ..................... Willemien Otten

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2. The Dialectics of the Icon: A Reference to God? .............................. Anton Houtepen

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3. Word and Image in Christian Rituals ............................................ Gerard Rouwhorst

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4. Seeing the Divine: a Holy Controversy ............................................ Alexander Even-Chen

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5. Our Image of ‘Others’ and Our Own Identity ................................. Daniela Müller

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6. Idolatry and the Mirror: Iconoclasm as a Prerequisite for Interhuman Relations ................................................................................... Marcel Poorthuis

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PART TWO

JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN DEBATES ON IMAGES UNTIL THE REFORMATION 6. Biblical Controversy: A Clash Between Two Divinely Inspired Messages? ................................................................................. Shulamit Laderman

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8. Anthropomorphism and its Eradication ......................................... Shamma Friedman

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9. Augustine’s Thoughts on How God May Be Represented ................. Paul van Geest

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10. The Saint as Icon: Transformation of Biblical Imagery in Early Medieval Hagiography .............................................................. Nienke Vos

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11. ‘Erant enim sine deo uero’: Iconoclash in Apocryphal and Liturgical Apostle Traditions of the Medieval West ...................................... Els Rose

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12. Tangible Words: Some Reections on the Notion of Presence in Gothic Art ............................................................................... Babette Hellemans

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13. Cathars and the Representation of the Divine: Christians of the Invisible .............................................................................. Anne Brenon

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14. The Clash Between Catholics and Cathars over Veneration of the Cross ............................................................................. Beverly Kienzle

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15. Poor Building: The Case of the Friars Minor ................................ Gerard Pieter Freeman

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PART THREE

PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND CATHOLIC REFORMATION 16. The Prohibition of Images and Protestant Identity ......................... Willem van Asselt

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17. Aspects of Iconoclasm in Utrecht—Today and in the Past ............... Casper Staal

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contents 18. The Alphen Pig War ................................................................. Joke Spaans 19. Papal Prohibitions Midway Between Rigor and Laxity. On the Issue of Depicting the Holy Trinity .................................... Jan Hallebeek

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PART FOUR

MODERN TIMES 20. The Politics of Representation: Prussian Monarchy and Roman Catholic Church in the Making of Saints During the 19th Century ... Angela Berlis 21. Christ, Art and the Nation. The Berlin ‘Christ Exhibition’ of 1896 and the Search for a Protestant Identity in Wilhelminian Germany ................................................................................. Christopher König

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22. The Written Icon: Images of God in Modern Dutch Literature ........ Jaap Goedegebuure

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23. The New Iconoclasm. The Avant-garde and the Catholic Church ..... Theo Salemink

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24. Vandalism as a Secular Iconoclasm .............................................. Alexander Demandt

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Index ...........................................................................................

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Plates ...........................................................................................

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INTRODUCTION Willem van Asselt, Paul van Geest, Daniela Müller, Theo Salemink Thou shalt not make unto 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 water under the earth Exodus 20:4—Authorised King James Version

In the summer of 2005 historians of Utrecht University organized an international conference, entitled ‘Iconoclash: The Struggle for Religious Identity’. The conference focused its attention on the process of iconoclash and iconoclasm as an important device for identifying the construction of religious identity. The conference gathered a selection of international scholars, from Jerusalem to Jena, from Carcassonne to Harvard USA. The contributors include Church historians, theologians, scholars of literature, and philosophers, who have engaged in fundamental questions regarding the representation of the deity and it possibilities. They examine the status of the image in Judaic and Christian thought and practice by identifying the tension between Image and Word, the relationship between image breaking and image making, the dialectics between the image of God, self-denition and the image of others, in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Additionally, it is argued that in the history of the monotheistic religions the tension between Word and Image played a decisive role in the formation and transformation of religious identity. These essays point out that the biblical proscription of ‘graven images’ (Exodus 20) gave rise to the different strains of privileging or prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia. In these controversies important issues emerged, such as the question whether it was allowed to depict the Godhead and the Holy or whether the prohibition of images implied a policy of breaking physical images (iconoclasm), or a strategy of suppressing mental or conceptual images (iconoclash).

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But the conicts were not simply over the propriety of images in general. The ‘war on images’ did not only articulate different views of the relationship between the Godhead and created reality, it also revealed the need of the different religious groups to dene themselves in relation to other religious groups. Therefore, both physical iconoclasm and conceptual iconoclash were closely linked with a search for certain identity-giving parameters for diverse religious communities, providing ideological justication for their continued existence in the face of rival religious movements that were disqualied as dissidents, heretics or gentiles. This implied intense and sometimes lengthy conicts on the use of images, which had abiding consequences for the life of religious communities. In the following sections we will lay out the origins and previous history of the conference on Iconoclasm, followed by a discussion of the thematic and methodical assumptions underlying the proceedings of the conference. The Conference in Context In the summer of 2001 the Utrecht church historians, based at Utrecht University and the Catholic Theological University, also in Utrecht, and gathered around the theme of ‘Identity in the Making’ as their joint research focus, organized their rst conference. The conference’s chosen title was Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation. Its leading question was to what extent religious traditions throughout history played a crucial role in determining the formation and/or continuation of religious identity by appealing to authoritative texts or to oral sources of inspired truth. In addition to constructing identity, so the ndings of the conference show, the appeal to authoritative tradition also helped to fence one’s identity off to others, to settle internal debates and, in extreme cases, even to excommunicate dissidents. The results of this rst Utrecht conference in church history were published in 2004 (Frishman, Otten, Rouwhorst, 2004). At the conference in the summer of 2005 the construction of identity was, again, the larger problem area, but this time the focus was on images as much as on words. The conference theme was the process of both iconoclasm and iconoclash (the war of images), and their contribution to the shaping and furthering of religious identity.

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Iconoclash in Karlsruhe The idea to organize this second conference on the theme of images goes back to an important art exhibit in Karlsruhe, held from May 4 through August 4, 2002, and entitled Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel edited the conference catalogue, which amounted to over 700 pages (Latour, Weibel, 2002). In this catalogue or anthology artists, art historians, philosophers and theologians brought together their ndings in a major project on ‘Image Wars’, ranging from art to politics, from Europe to Asia, from past to present. In word and image important questions were being asked, such as why images cause so much violence or why monotheism tends to reject sacred images. More specically, investigations were launched into the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the difference between icon and idol, different types of iconoclash and the role of the avant-garde in the war of images. Also, the transformation of former iconoclasts into new image-makers was brought out: why did Mao Zedong destroy all traces and images of Tibetan Buddhism and why did communism import a new ‘red’ pseudo-religion, decked out with social images and saints? Or why did the Taliban in Afghanistan feel compelled to destroy the giant, age-old Bamiyan Buddha in 2002? Goals of the Utrecht Conference The Karlsruhe-exhibit had a specic art historical and art philosophical focus, directed as it was at portraying and analyzing physical images and statues. The church historical conference in Utrecht 2005 focused on the notion of iconoclasm and iconoclash in a much broader sense. At the center of attention one nds not just physical but also mental images and icons. As can be expected, the theological roots of iconoclasm, as a phenomenon occurring in all three religions of the Book, especially in Judaism and Christianity, proved to be of special interest for the church history group. Historical and theological methods may well complement the art historical approach of the Karlsruhe-exhibit. The contributions at the conference all aim to answer the following set of questions: what role does the image-controversy play in the genesis and transformation of religious identity? What special place is held by the imagination of the transcendent God? What actually was at stake in the various image-related clashes? To what extent does the representation and ‘image or imagination’ of religious others contribute to

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the demarcation of one’s identity, especially when seen in relation to the representation of the divine? Further questions focus on how to dene and evaluate the tension between W/word and icon in these religions of the book? Is ‘word’ more suitable than ‘image’ or ‘icon’ to approach the sacred? Does a special icon-language exist to describe religious art? In this introduction we will lay out provisional answers to a few thematic and methodical questions. Methodological Issues Iconoclash versus Iconoclasm A rst difference to be introduced is that between (1) iconoclash and (2) iconoclasm. While it is clear that the conference aims at covering both themes, it is useful to distinguish carefully between them. 1. Iconoclash refers to a clash between and about (the use of ) images. In our view this does not just concern the artistic status of iconic language, but conjures up the full spectrum of physical and mental imagination. Whether the clash of icons takes place inside a single individual or is spread across various collective wholes, ranging from religion to art and from advertising to politics, is secondary to its reality, as it involves a real collision of different (worlds of ) images. The congress in Utrecht located the clash of icons and images specically within the religious sphere, concentrating on Judaism and Christianity, while trying to cover a historical time-span of nearly three millennia. 2. Iconoclasm, as our second term of reference, has a more technical meaning, pertaining to the destruction of and/or suspicion against physical representations of the divine, the sacred, the transcendent. An important question in this context is whether God can be accurately represented by human images, or whether any representation does by denition detract from the divine original? Does the making of human images not force us into idolatry, or are some images more suitable to depict the sacred than others? While Russian icons are generally seen to be especially suitable in portraying the divine, avant-garde art was by contrast nearly always considered blasphemous. Here the question becomes relevant whether words are more suitable as containers of divine presence than images. As

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for its theological roots, iconoclasm goes back to the prohibition in Ex. 20: 4–5: ‘You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them’. Extrapolating from the specic Exodus-text, we can nd iconoclasm in a wider sense in those situations where new groups or periods present us with a total makeover of earlier group or period identity. Five Types of Iconoclash Can different types of iconoclash, including iconoclasm, actually be ranked or classied? Obviously, taxonomies are always difcult, if not arbitrary. Still, it may be of help to try and situate one’s own object and approach by integrating them as components in a larger matrix. In this regard we have tried to follow Bruno Latour, philosopher and sociologist of science by training, and co-author of the Iconoclash Anthology with Peter Weibel (Latour, 2002). Although Latour’s classication is not used extensively in the contributions to the present book, as a heuristic tool it was very helpful to articulate the concept of the conference. In his introduction Latour sums up ve types of iconoclash for us, seeing iconoclasm as a mere subcategory. Dividing up humanity into different types of people, he distinguishes between their different degree of appreciation of and receptivity towards the value and validity of images. 1. A-people are those people who are principally opposed to the role of images as mediating truth, objectivity and holiness. This ‘puritan’ form of iconoclash can have a religious (cf. the prohibition in Exodus 20) or a political application (cf. Mao’s cultural revolution). The aim of this radical type of iconoclash is to strive for purication, that is, towards the removal and deletion of all images representing truth or holiness. As demonstrated by the Byzantine image-controversy in the eighth century, however, worldly art was not considered equally dangerous in guarding religious or political purity. 2. In contrast to A-people, B-people are not principally sided against all mediation through images. They specically wish to resist the notion of a ‘frozen imagination’. Such a freezing is the case when certain elevated eternal images put a stop to the dynamics of a continuous stream of passing images.

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3. C-people are not opposed to images as such, but reject the concrete images of their opponents as false. The burning of the enemy’s ag or the destruction of images of other religions both belong in this category, as does the demonizing of one’s foes, stereotyping them as inhuman, for example, or disqualifying them as diabolical. 4. D-people are those humans who unwittingly and involuntarily come to destroy images. In this category we nd the example of craftsmen who in the process of restoring the original happen to destroy (other) images. 5. E-people, nally, are those people who suspend judgment towards the possibility of mediation through images. They do so not out of any opposition to images per se but because they relativize the usefulness of this kind of mediation. Bruno Latour himself seems to favour position B, as he ercely criticizes the freezing of images. Summarizing his position he states the following: Thus, the crucial distinction we wish to draw in this show is not between a world of images and a world of no-images—as the image warriors would have us believe—but between the interrupted ow of pictures and a cascade of them. (Latour, 2002, 32)

Two Kinds of Images Latour’s classication of different types of iconoclash has its limitations to the extent that it applies exclusively to material images and statues, especially in the world of art and culture. With regard to iconoclash in the religious sphere, mental images play an important role as well. For this reason we have decided to distinguish between two kinds of images which feature alternatively in the different contributions to the conference. Hoping to heighten the effect of Latour’s typology, we want to zoom in especially on the theological context in which the different icons and icon-clashes come to life. Based on these considerations, we suggest a distinction between the use and function of: 1. Material images. Here we think specically of the portrayal of God and human beings in the visual arts (sculptures and paintings); 2. Mental images. Iconoclash may be directed against mental depictions of God and human beings, as they can become locked up in theological or philosophical models of thought. As an example we may point to the dogmatic ‘wars’ about the Trinity. In this context iconoclash

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refers specically to the question whether the divine can at all be thought with the help of secular rationality (philosophy) and, if so, how to legitimate this rational approach. It seems that we are dealing here with a clash involving divergent models of thought. Controversy about mental imagery can be widened further to include the realm of metaphors as well, as these may or may not derive from human language or literature. The use of metaphors like ‘father’, ‘shepherd’, and ‘re’ for God, or the metaphor ‘bride’ to indicate either the Jewish people or the Christian church provides ample grounds for such verbal iconoclashes (Cf. Van Geest, 2007, 21–67). Iconoclash here almost acts as a synonym for rivalling poetic applications of metaphors, as they are either deemed correct or incorrect. The Prohibition of Images and the Anthropological Turn As said, we consider iconoclasm as a subcategory of the wider term iconoclash. We would like to focus more closely on the idea of a prohibition of images and explore its possible motives, as listed in Exodus 20. Was it necessary to protect the purity of God? (Boespug, 1998, 446–468). Was it a struggle against demons and hence, from a more sociological perspective, ultimately a struggle to prevent apostasy and defeat paganism? Or does the history of the three monotheistic religions revolve around the protection of human dignity and freedom over and against the threat of idolatry, that is, the divinizing of what must ultimately be seen as human products? In other words: can we perhaps see the Exodus-quotation as a form of religious criticism? Such an interpretation harbours the suggestion that the prohibition of images does not just come about as an attempt to protect God against wrongful devotion, but aims in the end at rejecting all images of all gods. If despite such caveats Jews and Christians still cling to images, then they are in fact seen to commit a form of adultery. For when strange gods are revered, it seems that the own identity, to the extent that it is rooted in worship, is severely at risk. Seen as a struggle against idolatry in the above sense, the prohibition of images has repeatedly given rise to iconoclastic outbursts against other religions and to violent wars against the adherents of other religions. At the same time it should be stated that the biblical prohibition of images does not need to have such implications. Building on the above arguments, one could perhaps speak of an anthropological turn in the interpretation of the prohibition of images

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in Judaism and Christianity. Guiding thought of this turn is the notion that both religions reject idolatry not because God stipulates it but rather because idols insult and defame human beings. The power and inuence that idols exercise over human beings ultimately derive from those human beings themselves. Seen in this way idols function as a kind of ‘externalization’ of human capacities and activities, of power, desire, and sexual appetite. They are ‘frozen’ human properties or acts, radiating a divine glance. This interpretation from the perspective of ideological and religious criticism connects nicely with the Exodus prohibition, as it brings out the anxiety and trepidation lurking in the desire to capture the divine in human and material form. Marcel Poorthuis has summarized this anthropological interpretation of the prohibition of images as follows: Seen as the image of God, the human person is the revelation of absolute truth and a bearer of those properties that are specically linked to the sacred: imperviousness, inviolability . . . Rather than teaching us the disappearance of metaphysics, the anthropocentric interpretation of the prohibition of images teaches us the elevation of the human body to where it represents the glory of the living God. (Poorthuis, 2002, 70–71)

This anthropological concern is also expressed by a chassidic anecdote from the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1808, during the times of Napoleon, rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, a chassidic scholar, burnt a book containing ‘holy thoughts’ on which he had intensively worked during a long period. What remained of this holy book was only its title. Marc-Alain Quaknin, writing on this anecdote in 1986, compared Nahman’s book burning with Moses’ smashing the two tables on mount Sinai after the sin of the Golden Calf (Quaknin, 1995). Rabbi Nahman, Quaknin argued, burning his own idol (the book) exemplied a strange paradox: by burning the book he resisted the temptation of making an idol of his own written word. Rabbi Nahman concluded, therefore, that ‘every image must include its own destruction, and every answer must include in its essence a question that may not be destroyed by the answer.’ The Image of ‘Others’ In Judaism, Christianity (and Islam) the theme of iconoclash does not just refer to a struggle about how to portray God accurately or how to destroy images that are considered blasphemous, but also how to imagine the individual and collective other. Here the issue is demar-

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cation rather than purication. The way in which religious communities effectively typecast ‘others’ reveals much about their underlying self-image. The need to judge and condemn dissenters appears to be essential if drawing up a group’s boundaries and protecting its internal cohesion (Ferziger, 2001). The three major religions of the Book have indeed created strong images about rivalling communities. Thus we have Christian stereotypes of Judaism (substitution theology, the killing of God, ritual murder, conspiracy theories, racial bias etc.) and of Islam, which is seen often as a pagan, sensual religion. Within Judaism and Islam comparable stereotypes developed about Christianity. Often this religious stereotyping reects broader cultural bias and prejudice. Here we may also make reference to the debates about orientalism (Edward Said) and occidentalism (Buruma, Margalit, 2004). Limiting ourselves to Christianity for a moment, we soon notice how dissident movements are often typecast as ‘heretical’, their members called apostates or servants of Satan. We further see ‘images’ of various kinds featuring in a polemical context, with the help God and the sacred often invoked for a very earthly struggle. The emergence of heresy is not necessarily indicative of a process of religious fragmentation, however, or of unbridled religious pluriformity. The reverse may also be true, as heresy may well emerge in a time of growing uniformity. Times may be such that orthodox church leaders introduce new criteria and concomitant measures, leaving older and more traditional ones behind and thereby provoking dissent. This calls for a new investigation of what ‘orthodoxy’ actually means as a church historical concept. When we speak about the images of ‘the others’, a rather broad spectrum is laid out. In addition to being called idolatrous, the socalled others may be considered amoral, power-hungry, unstable and volatile, fraudulent, uncivilized etc. Adding emphasis to more general terms of disapproval and condemnation, the charge of idolatry can play an important role, referring both to physical statues and images and to mental images. The ‘others’ are not just portrayed as ‘different’, but as unholy, sacrilegious, diabolical, and inhuman. In some cases the war of images resulted in the destruction of images and of those symbols considered typical of other religions or cherished by internal dissidents. Far worse, however, the clash of icons could also lead to the physical persecution and elimination of others as the ultimate attempt to suppress dissent. For this reason, this volume also calls for a more general discussion of the typecasting of other religions and confessions by religious adher-

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ents. In doing so, our focus will naturally be on the transformation of otherness from difference to dissent as a tool to strengthen one’s own position, but we will also reach further. In his study of hostile images about Islam in modern history, the political scientist Christoph Weller has made the following pertinent comment: Gerade in Konikten ist die Parteinahme, die Zugehörigkeit zur Ingroup besonders wichtig für das Selbstbild des/der einzelnen, Koniktsituationen schaffen also ‘gute’ Voraussetzungen für eine übereinstimmende Kategorisierung—und damit für die Entstehung von Feindbilder. (Weller, 2002, 56)

Weller evidently holds that by seeing themselves within the safe context of an in-group people are better able to structure and organize their social landscape, strengthening their personal and social identity in one sweep. Apparently, so he argues, this process of categorization leads people to see the adherents of the ‘out-group’ as more negative than those of the ‘in-group’. In and of itself this functioning of what is largely a psychological mechanism does not need to be considered dangerous, as long as it is open to correction through experience. Also, since people generally belong to different ‘in-groups’, they mostly have the experience of being placed in ‘out-groups’ by others as well, giving them sufcient tools to negotiate a stable identity. Thus they can be man or woman, church-going theist or atheist, Dutch citizen or immigrant, employer or employee, teacher or student. In the absence of any self-correction, however, negative forms of typecasting can become xated, as when they are spread far and wide through the media or take institutional shape in ecclesiastical or administrative structures. In a further move, demonic images can become so enlarged that they lead to superhuman scenarios involving a cosmic dualism of good versus evil. As a result they become deadly in a multiple sense, as they literally unleash war. Such typecasting can easily become part of a propaganda machine to mobilize as many people as possible in the struggle against otherness. With dehumanization quickly followed by demonization, the enemy is stigmatized as the adversary of humanity at large. This stigmatization process validates in turn the struggle against the enemy, while reinforcing the correctness of the chosen image at the same time. This congress focused on the transformation of the image of others into more negative stereotypes as a tool to strengthen the in-group’s internal cohesion. But we did not only pay attention to the resulting struggles and wars. The opposite scenario may also hold, displaying

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the remarkable complexity of the matter. First, alternation between the dominant and the deviant group in the typecasting process does not just imply that the deviant group rejects the assigned images or labels, for it may well decide to embrace them. Inside Christianity this has led to new patterns of identity formation, in which being the victim of deviant groups or individuals became a central concern, and in which new cultural values appreciating guilt and suffering were brought to the fore. As a second point, there is always the chance that people criticize the standard images based on their different experiences in life, thereby putting into perspective the sharp dichotomy of friend versus enemy. These observations also put in perspective the problem area of what is commonly labelled as orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The history of iconoclasm shows the remarkable phenomenon that in later times, opinions that were previously seen as a form of heterodoxy became standard for new forms of orthodoxy. This much broader problem area, however, is outside the scope of this book and should be incorporated in future research. New Images of God in a Secular World Finally, this conference called attention to the ‘war of images’ in secular modern times. While the historical struggle concerning the image of God and the ght against idolatry clearly had religious overtones, in (post)modern times a new and secular dimension has been added. Secular movements such as liberalism, feminism, nationalism, National Socialism or socialism/communism struggled against the old monotheistic religions. These old religions were seen as forms of superstition or ideology. The old religions on their turn often charged the new movements with neo-paganism, regarding some of their symbols as modern idols (Reason, Money, Market, Führer or Leader, Race, Class, feminism etc.), thus becoming heavily involved in the struggle against secular idolatry. The question then comes to the fore to what extent these new secular movements developed or may still develop new secular images of God or Transcendence. With regard to our chosen conference theme, some secular movements will be questioned both on their image-politics and on their recycling of the trodden images of old. An example: the French Revolution destroyed Christian images and replaced them by images derived from the religion of Reason and Liberty. Annie Jourdan describes this ‘substitution process’ as ‘a cleaning and purication of the public domain’ and as a substitution

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of the old sacred symbols by new ones: temples, theatres and statues symbolizing the principles of the new constitution (Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood). It included the introduction of a republican calendar, new rituals, the tricolour, and—mirabile dictu—a festival devoted to the Supreme Godhead. From this Jourdain concluded that, apparently, a modern state like the French Republic, in its search for a new identity, was not able to give up the sacred dimensions. At the same time, she wonders why humanity in general, even in the process of secularization, remains so forcefully attached to the transcendental dimension. She even suggests that the introduction of a religious dimension might be a requisite for a successful transition from the existing order to a new one ( Jourdan, 2003). ‘Image Wars’ are also exemplied by new ‘political religions’ such as the socialist and, especially, the communist movements in Eastern Europe, China and Asia which were characterized by the ourishing of new rituals and images, as well as the veneration of ‘saints’ (Marx, Engels, Stalin, Mao). Most of the time this process was accompanied by a ‘war’ against the images and symbols of the ‘old’ religions: Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism. In this respect, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the removal of the images of the ‘new saints’ (Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin) symbolized the changing of powers. Within this context, mention must also be made of the political religion of the Nazi regime. After the tactical strategy of promoting a ‘positive Christianity’ (1933–34), it introduced a new religion of race in which religious elements deriving from the old German tradition, Asiatic symbols, gnostic and apocalyptic ideas, were mixed with modern militaristic and nationalistic symbols and rituals (Ley, Schoeps, 1997). Recent scholarship has pointed out that National Socialism can be seen as a ‘secular religion’, a ‘surrogate religion’ or even a religious ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (Wagner). An example of this new approach can be seen in the proceedings of the 1995 conference in Vienna organized by Michael Ley en Julius H. Schoeps under the title Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Ley, Schoeps, 1997; cf. Ley, 1993). In 2002 Michael Ley published his Holocaust als Menschenopfer. Vom Christentum zur politischen Religion des Nationalsozialismus, in which he defended the thesis that the Shoa was seen by the Nazi’s as a necessary human sacrice for the sake of an apocalyptic rescue operation for mankind. Ley also showed that National Socialism was a product of different strains in European history: a combination of an age old religious anti-Semitism with medieval chiliastic expectations, and inuenced by secularization,

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romanticism and utopianism, it resulted in one of the most dangerous forms of ‘political’ religion.’ In the eyes of the Nazi’s the murder of the European Jews was a sacred rite, an expiation that was needed for the recreation of the world (Ley, 2002). The religious character of National Socialism had two faces: on the one hand it gloried the achievements of modernity, on the other hand it revived old religious traditions (Salemink, 2003, 160, 291–311). A special role in the modern ‘image wars’ should be assigned to the Avant-garde in modern art. This movement aimed at a revolution in the creation of images. It was closely connected with a spiritual, and sometimes, a political revolution. During the First World War artists such as Kandinsky, Marc, Malevitch, Picasso, and movements like ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, Dadaism, and, later on, ‘Bauhaus’ and surrealism, declared traditional art bankrupt and inaugurated an iconoclastic outbreak sui generis. In contrast to earlier iconoclastic movements in Byzantine and Protestant Christianity, it aimed at the liberation of ‘images and their language’ from the nineteenth-century bourgeois culture as well as a liberation of images deriving from Christian metaphysics. Artistic images were not any more seen as a representation of reality or as a service to the Church or religious revelation, but as an secular attempt to discover the order of a new symbolic universe in oneself by developing a new ‘language of images’ with its own form, colour and texture as pathway to a spiritual reality which the churches and political movements had neglected or lost. In the 1912 almanac of Der Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky published his brochure Über die Formfrage, and in the same year he wrote his famous essay Über das Geistige in der Kunst, in which he discussed the ‘prophetic function’ of modern art. In his opinion modern art should not be viewed as an echo or mirror of reality, but as prophetic call to developing a new spiritual life. He concluded his essay by saying that ‘it was now the time to see the appearance of a new area in which the work of the painter is closely related to the intentional creation of a new spiritual domain: now it is time for a new epoch in which the great spiritual dimension of art will be revealed’ (Kandinsky, 1982, 131–132, 219). Although the Avant-garde was a pluriform movement, perhaps abstract art presented the most radical form of iconoclasm, because it rejected all empirical references to reality outside the work of art but without destroying the image as such. In stead it used new media in order to transfer the spiritual dimension. A good example of this new form of secular iconoclasm is the ‘Black Square’ (1915) of Malevitch,

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one of the great icons of the Avant-garde that presents an image of the face of God in ‘the essence of his perfection’ in a secular world. Although his ‘Black Square’ was certainly inspired by the tradition and theology of the Russian icons, it freed itself from the supervision of the old churches: it created a new form of modern religion (Drutt, 2003, 89–95). In several contributions of this volume the iconoclastic motives of the Avant-garde artists and, consequently, the disapproval of churchly authorities will be addressed. As in visual art, these iconoclastic phenomena can also be observed in music. A good example is the (unnished) opera Moses und Aron composed by Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951): it extrapolates the traditional prohibition of graven images including the story of the Golden Calf to a new secular context.1 In this opera, Moses is presented as a radical puritan who ghts against all human natural inclination to venerate images of the invisible: he addresses God as the ‘Unique, Eternal, Omnipresent, Invisible and Unthinkable God’. For Schönberg, the human voice is equivalent to word, music to image; music has, therefore, the potency to become an idol trying to imagine the invisible. Thus in this opera, Moses does not sing, but only speaks. Finally, we may refer to the Jewish museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 1999 (Schneider, 1999). In this museum Libeskind created six empty shafts symbolizing emptiness (‘voids’, like the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant) and articulating the fact that there are no images available to describe the sufferings of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the ‘voids’ are images. The building can be seen as a ‘reversed cathedral’ and as an iconoclastic philosophy carved in stone. For his project, Libeskind entered into conversation with the twentieth century Avant-garde, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, the poet Paul Celan, and the composer Arnold Schönberg, the creator of Moses und Aaron. As heirs of modern criticism Libeskind, Benjamin and Schönberg have deeply gauged the new order and disorder of modernity and the potential force of secular idols, as well as the temptation of producing new images. But, at the same time, in reversing the old images they created new anti-images which enabled them to criticize the old ones, as is impressively illustrated in the famous painting Angelus novus of Paul Klee. 1

A. Schoenberg, Mozes und Aron [Uitvoering Sir Georg Solti, Decca 1985 (414 264–2 DH2)].

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Overview of the Contributions to This Volume Word and Image: Fundamental questions The various contributions to this volume are divided into four main parts. In the rst part we have six essays which set up a general discussion of the eld. In the opening piece Willemien Otten explores the complex relationship between World, Word and Image in Christianity. She discusses the general effect of the Word, especially as it relates to the Christian notions of creation and incarnation and shows how these notions—due to the interrelated development of exegesis and doctrine—resulted in an ever expanding web of meaning. Whereas the world was seen as the product of divine creation and as such a reected divine activity, the human person was seen as the image par excellence, with the iconic character of humanity being both heightened and redeemed in Christ’s incarnation. After discussing the different approaches to images in the early-modern Catholic and Protestant traditions, she turns to the tradition of pre-modernity and, following Jean-Luc Marion’s analysis in his book God Without Being, she points to the fact that being (esse) in classical Thomism could easily develop into an idol rather than an icon of the divine. She summarizes her view with a set of reections derived from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, revealing how Augustine locates the tension between word and images inside a larger integrative vision by means of a distinction between res and signa (See Pollmann, 1996). She concludes with a plea for the use of and need for images in communicating the word. Likewise, Anton Houtepen’s contribution deals with the constructive and de-constructive role image controversies have played in the formation and transformation of religious identity, in the past as well as in the present. In a broad overview he analyses the referential character of religious imagination in pre-modern times. In modern and post-modern times, however, we are witness to an epistemological revolt. Secularization has reduced every form of religious imagination to a function of human need and desire without reference to any extra-mental reality. In addition, he argues that, after the collapse of conceptual systems of thought in post-modern times, Christian theology might be helped to rediscover and ground anew its referential character and its legitimate place in the world of thought by developing an iconic hermeneutic. Such a hermeneutics differs from aesthetics in that it does not interpret the icon in a representational mode, looking for the indexical meaning of

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the image, but concentrates on its ‘deictic’ function, either as ‘logo’ (Naomi Klein) or as ‘scenery’. In other words: the icon invites its spectators to participate in its scenery and to be taken up in the life-goals and the divine communion with Christ. This hermeneutical function, he concludes, makes real participation in the life of the divine referent of the icon (or liturgy) possible and, as any other hermeneutical process, it implies the transformation or re-guration (P. Ricoeur) of the participants. Gerard Rouwhorst elaborates further the function of word and image in Christian liturgical rituals. Like all other rituals, Christian liturgical celebrations are composed of both verbal and non-verbal elements. He shows how in the course of liturgical history, the proportion of both the verbal and non-verbal elements to each other have considerably varied. Whereas the liturgy of the Early Church shared with the synagogue and, later on the churches of the Reformation, a strong focus on the reading and the explanation of the Bible, after the victory over the Iconoclasts the Byzantine traditions have been characterized by a strong emphasis on the visual dimension. Within this context Rouwhorst observes that in early medieval Western Christianity, the use of visual symbols dramatically increased since the introduction of the liturgical traditions of Rome in the regions north and west of the Alps. He claims that this radical shift from word to image relates to the increasing emphasis on the sacredness of liturgy as well as on the role of the priests. There is all the more reason for the plausibility of this claim since, in the liturgical reform movements, criticism of these aspects of medieval liturgy, sometimes designated as ‘magical’ and ‘clerical’, and the separation between the sacramental and the profane realm, tend to go hand in hand with an opposition against the visual elements in the liturgy such as the ordination rites and the vestments of the priests. Alexander Even-Chen’s contribution focuses on the Jewish tradition and the ‘holy controversy’ in this tradition regarding the possibility of seeing the divine. By means of an analysis of the theology of Abraham Josua Heschel (1907–1972), he explores Heschel’s conception of divine revelation and its corresponding anthropology which inuenced his reading of Rabbinic sources. Within the Jewish tradition Heschel observed different schools of thought in answering the question ‘whether it is possible to see God’. Heschel presented Rabbi Ishmael’s school as the one who taught that mortals can neither see nor comprehend the nature of the divine glory.

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Rabbi Akiva and his school, however, based their view on the assumption that man, created by God and resembling his image, is able, in principle, to behold the divine glory and presence. Within this context Even-Chen further explores Heschel’s position and concludes that the controversy is reected in Heschsel’s own soul and theology. Daniela Müller’s contribution deals with another important aspect of the iconoclash-theme of the conference. It presents a careful analysis of the mechanism developed within the medieval christianitas concept of the Western Latin Church to label opposition parties and their ideas with recurring stereotypes and rhetoric thereby creating an image of the ‘others’ resulting in an exclusion of deviant groups and the reinforcement of the correctness of one’s own religion. She illustrates the operation of this mechanism as present not only in visual representations but also in literary motives. It was especially pope Gregory VII who used the creation of images as a means of propaganda to mobilize the ght against ‘the others’, such as seductive women, heretics, Jews and Muslims. For propaganda reasons they all were accused of most evil deeds. Additionally, she explores the great variety of motives that was developed, all of which aimed at proving the dangers of the ‘others’ and legitimizing the ght against ‘the others’. Müller also notes that through the depiction of debauchery of ‘the others’ fantasy was offered a means of compensation for the repression of sensuality which went hand in hand with the increasing moralization of medieval Christian society. She concludes her essay by pointing to the relatedness and interaction between the religious and social levels in producing an image of ‘others’ and, consequently, the reinforcement of one’s own identity. In his essay, inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, Marcel Poorthuis embarks on some fundamental philosophical reections regarding the conference theme. Philosophy, he argues, may be regarded as the plea for the integrity of the subject, combating irrational myths that try to overwhelm the subject with numinous experience and robbing the subject of its freedom and autonomy. In this respect philosophy may be considered an ally of monotheism in the shared rejection of idolatry. At the same time, however, this train of rational thought eliminates the primary experience of the other being as ‘radically’ other. By denying the difference between me and the other, the experience of the other is robbed from its dimensions of majesty and of transcendence. The other is reduced to the phenomenological realm to which I belong myself as well, and is seen as a re-denition or mirror-image of myself. Should this be considered to be a form of idolatry? Exploring the biblical

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prohibition of idolatry, Poorthuis argues that it primarily refers to the attitude of man rather than to something intrinsic in the object. Following Levinas, he assumes that the transcendent experience of the face of the other constitutes as it were the antipode of idolatry, whereas denying that transcendence might bring us close to idolatry. The experience of the transcendent breaking through the phenomenological appearance of the other is, according to Poorthuis, the philosophical expression of iconoclasm. His conclusion is that iconoclasm interpreted in radically human terms, constitutes the way to transcendence, to asymmetrical responsibility and to an ethics of donation to the other. A child looking in the mirror and recognizing the face of the other before its own face appears seems to have preserved the fundamental experience of the ‘otherness’ of the other. Jewish and Christian Debates on Images Until the Reformation In the second part of this volume a cluster of themes is presented exploring the developments within Jewish rabbinical thought on images, controversies on images in the Early Church of Western Europe (Augustine), and developments in Medieval traditions such as in medieval hagiography, apocryphal and liturgical apostle traditions, and the ‘image war’ of the iconoclastic Cathars versus the Catholic tradition. It opens with an essay of Shulamith Laderman that focuses on the tension between the concept of the transcendent God that, according to Exodus 20, is not be represented by any visual form and the instructions to create images of the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies of God’s Tabernacle, as explained in Exodus 25. Laderman describes extensively the attempts in Jewish tradition to resolve the contradiction involved in these two ‘divinely inspired messages’ by pointing to the fact that the Cherubim covering the Ark were not meant to be iconic images, but rather designed as a metaphor for God’s transcendence. In Jewish understanding, she argues, the symbolic schema of the empty space between the Cherubim’s wings (‘void’) represented the invisible presence of God the Creator. Remarkably, she notes that in the Christian art tradition the empty space between the Cherubim’s wings was interpreted as pointing to the parousia of Jesus, as described in the Gospel of Matthew 25: 31–34. After discussing the long and complex history of the visual representation of the Cherubim in Jewish and Christian art (see the illustrations in her article), she concludes by saying that

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in both the Jewish and Christian traditions the visual image and the word—biblical, exegetical, theological, or typological—were bound together in approaching the sacred. In addition, Shamma Friedman continues the discussions on images in the Jewish traditions by focusing on the Talmudic-Midrashic debates. The rst part of his contribution deals with Maimonides’ struggle against traditional anthropomorphic concept in comparison with Augustine’s work in the same area; in the second part Friedman discusses a passage from the mystical work Shiur Qomah, already attested in the sixth or early seventh century that insisted on perfect proportionalism of divine anatomy based upon the Greek tradition of ideal relative measurements of the human body. In this rabbinic source the patriarch Jacob is the outstanding representative of this paradigm, while, at the same, it explains the original meaning of the legend that Jacob’s icon was engraved upon the divine throne. According to Friedman, this is a remarkable example in the Jewish tradition of a unrecognized presentation of the divine image with human likeness, indistinguishable in both physique and physiognomy. Friedman’s article allows for comparisons with the next contribution on Augustine’s thought on images. In this essay Paul van Geest defends the thesis that on the one hand, Augustine may be seen as the precursor of apophatic theology (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite), in which it was argued that God ‘s being and activity cannot be dened in terms that mirror or refer to earthly conditions. Analysis of Augustine’s rst commentary on Genesis, his sermons, and De Trinitate, reveals Augustine’s fear to perceive God as having corporeal qualities. At the other hand, however, Van Geest points to the fact that in the Confessiones Augustine ‘negates the negation’ by looking for human experiences by which he tries to make God perceptible in his imperceptibility. Within this context Augustine, following the hermeneutics of Ambrose, did not hesitate to evoke an awareness or experience of God by appealing to man’s sensory faculties and using tangible metaphors and anthropomorphisms. In a similar way, Augustine presented the memory of sensory and affective experiences as parallel to the experience of God. At the same time, however, he opposes those metaphors and anthropomorphisms as inadequate for representing God. In this way Augustine avoided the dualism between God and world, the nite and innite, into which between several apologists ( Justin, Minucius Felix, and Tertullian) in their debate with Greek philosophy had become embroiled.

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In her contribution, Nienke Vos explores how in early medieval hagiography, biblical images functioned in the formation of the saint as icon. She focuses on three Latin hagiographical sources which followed in the wake of the Greek Life of Antony in the middle of the fourth century: the Life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus (ca. 400 CE), the Life of Benedict by Gregory the Great (ca. 600 CE) and the Life of Willibrord by Alcuinus (ca. 800 CE). These vitae recount the lives of their respective saints in order to entertain and motivate the reader. On a fairly literary level, she discusses the way in which the different saints operated as missionaries in a pagan context. In this context she analyses the central notion of ‘miracle’ in these narratives and the many violent scenes which can easily be dened as instances of iconoclash. Subsequently, she presents a more metaphorical sense in which iconoclash, or rather ‘icono-change’ occurs. Further analysis brings Vos to the conclusion that in all three vitae, the saint encapsulates religious and political interests and that he—in a sense—becomes the icon of the entire situation. Finally, she points to the importance of biblical material in the styling of the saints and shows how the biblical imagery in these vitae is transformed, due to the interests of the authors. Additionally, Else Rose’s essay deals with apocryphal traditions on the apostolic missionary activities after Pentecost and draws some lines of comparison between the narrative apocryphal traditions on the one hand and liturgical sources on the other hand. In considering these sources she concentrates on the clash between the apostle as representative of the new, Christian religion, and representations of the existing, ‘other religion’ which are depicted as ‘idols’, ‘demons’ and ‘magicians.’ She shows how in the Latin rendition of the apocryphal acts of the apostles both iconoclash and iconoclasm are occurring themes which reect the foundation of a new religious identity which played a crucial role in the development of a liturgical cult of the apostles. Especially, the imagination of a struggle between ‘apostle’ and ‘demon’ is shown to be an important example of the reception of apocryphal traditions in medieval liturgy. This development makes also clear that the clash between different religious world views with their own religious imagination and their own gods becomes a clash between sin and salvation within one Christian community, even within the soul of the individual Christian. Babette Hellemans focuses on the problem of incarnation as a ‘creative act’, especially in gothic art and texts. The selected examples turn around awareness of being and not-being by ocular proof and,

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analogous to the notion of the Eucharist’s hoc est corpus meum, to seeing and not-seeing. The thirteenth century Bibles Moralisées, consisting of and enveloping the totality of the Christian faith, serve as a case study. It will be argued that ‘reading’ these Bibles is an entirely performative act, and should therefore be ‘three-dimensional’ in the same way one sight-sees a gothic cathedral. In the last two sections the topic thus indicated is illustrated by giving some examples taken from sources in modern literature and philosophy. The following contribution of Anne Brenon relates the theme of the conference with Catharism, which the Roman Church denounced and rejected as heresy. The Cathars established their own religious course by identifying themselves with the true and authentic Christian Church over and against the ‘false Roman Church’ as the church of wealth and persecution. They rejected and often mocked practices they found superstitious, in particular the cult of saints and relics, transubstantiation, and all forms of miraculous intervention. Brenon points to the fact that the fundamental Christian dualism of Cathar theology seems to imply that no room was left for anthropomorphic representations of divinity and that among the Cathars there was no possibility for artistic expression. She shows that this idea is refuted by the fact that while these heretics—Christians of the Book—neither built nor sang nor sculpted, they did copy Bibles, and probably very productively. One of these bibles escaped from the Inquisition (present in the Municipal Library of Lyon as ms PA 36) and contains a complete New Testament translated into Occitan. It can be dated to the thirteenth century and includes lovely illuminated initials, painted in red and blue, but no representation of human or animal gures, except the sh, an early Christian symbol for Christ. This kind of ‘Cathar art’ in the thirteenth century, Brenon argues, should be linked to the heretical brothers of the Cathars, the Waldensian Bibles. Beverly Kienzle addresses the conference theme by focusing on the theory and praxis related to the cross and its veneration in the Middle Ages. It involved a wide array of practices, from liturgical veneration and processions to meditations and visions, from gestures of signing to wearing crosses for protection, healing and punishments. Moreover, those whose lives or ideas did not conform to the theology and practices of the cross were called its enemies (inimici crucis). For medieval authors, the phrase designated sinners, heretics, Jews and Muslims. This theology and practice was set forth in the crusades in order to preserve the land of the cross for the Christians and to pursue the so-called enemies

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of the cross in the Holy Land and various areas of Europe. Dissident Christians objected to the theology of the cross, the everyday practices involving it, and the development of crusading ideology. In her essay she focuses on three thirteenth and fourteenth-century texts related to preaching that exemplify representative views from both sides. Finally, Gerard Pieter Freeman provides a contribution related to medieval spirituality and practice. He discusses the mental image of the ‘poor Christ’ that determined the identity of the rst Friars Minor. This image was not an abstract idea that needed to be exemplied, nor was it an ideal that ought to put into practice. It was the result of a choice to ‘leave the world’, that is, to leave the city of Assisi and to give up the values of its citizens. After discussing the way in which they formed their identity, Freeman concludes that the Friars cannot be seen as a iconoclastic movement, although the situation changed during the conict of the spiritual Franciscans with pope John XXII. Paradoxically, the image of the poor Christ was very successful in medieval Christianity and, in his essay, Freeman traces the consequences of the mental image of the poor Christ for the material images the rst Friars produced. He does so by investigating the oldest versions of their general constitutions in which some restrictive regulations are found on Church building and Church design. A recurring theme of these prescriptions is that art may not threaten charity, as well as the theme of credibility. According to the author, this implied a complex paradox between poverty and alms-giving. Receiving alms implied a loss of poverty and refusal of alms was not seen as an option, because such a refusal might offend the benevolent benefactor. During the thirteenth century this paradox was exemplied in important churches like the Church of San Francesco in Assisi. Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reformation In the third part of this volume ample attention is paid to the renowned iconoclastic movement during the Reformation, its theological backgrounds, and, specically its impact on sixteenth-century Dutch Calvinism, especially in the city of Utrecht where the conference was held. Moreover, it discusses the different views of the three main Reformers (Luther, Zwingli and Calvin) on the prohibition of images and their impact on Protestant identity, including also the production of polemical cartoons by which the Public Reformed Church in the Dutch Republic provided an ideological justication for its existence. Although

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the Council of Trent defended the practice of the Catholic Church as regards the veneration of images, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed two important papal prohibitions of depicting the Holy Trinity in a particular way. These debates show that the image controversy was not a prerogative of the Reformation. In the rst essay on the relationship between the prohibition of images and Protestant identity Willem Jan van Asselt argues that although the image question was not a central theme of the Reformation, and that the controversy broke out when the Reformation movement had already found strong popular support, the rejection of the medieval cult implied by the rejection of images, altered in a drastic way the life of a large part of the European population. It divided the continent into several types of religious societies, each visibly different from its other. The prohibition of images did not only divide Catholics and Protestants, but also the Reformed and Lutheran Churches. At the same time, Van Asselt shows that Protestantism did not imply a complete break with the Roman Catholic world of images, symbols and rituals. In early modern times the Lutheran and Reformed too developed a religious tradition (exemplum tradition) in which they created their own visual culture in which ‘living saints’ were celebrated: the prophetic reformer, the protestant martyr, the godly preacher etc. His conclusion is that despite its impressive theological enterprise and its iconoclastic attempts to reform medieval piety, the Reformation was not so radical and successful as suggested in traditional historiography. Additionally, Caspar Staal offers a sketch of the iconoclastic movement in the Low Countries, especially in the city of Utrecht. He shows how in Utrecht the iconoclasm movement with its defacement of cultic objects of previous generations that were burned or reduced to rubble, tested and strained the political system of the local authorities, since it challenged civic as well as ecclesiastical authorities. Jo Spaans relates the conference theme to an analysis of a seventeenth-century cartoon which is alternatively designated as Fraticide near Alphen—village in South-Holland—or Pig-war. It shows two men wearing city clothes and hats that are ghting off a troop of pigs, which have overrun a third man. The attendant rhymed dialogue points to the fact that the picture does not refer to some innocent rural activity but is meant as a cartoon, in which an incident is satirized, probably a local theologico-political conict that ts the wider context of the rivalry between two opposing factions of Voetians and Cocceians. After a sharp analysis of the historical events lying behind the satirical

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print, she points out that the print on the Alphen Pig War should be classied as satirical-moralistic emblem rather than as a cartoon in the modern sense. It was not designed for a popular audience, for its meaning was skilfully hidden, so that only insiders would get the message. It was meant as an indictment of ‘fanaticism’ referring to the way religion had been abused to embarrass and upset political authority. Being an interesting link in the development from allegory to cartoon, the picture confronts the viewer with conicting images of peace and conict, of order and disorder, of clerical fanaticism and the duties of an enlightened sovereign. Published at the end of the seventeenth century, it endorsed the 1694 resolution by of States of Holland ‘towards the peace in the Church’. For the Dutch Republic this was a crucial moment, because at that time new theological controversies seemed to trigger again a political crisis, like the Arminian one at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thus, the print of the Alphen Pig War is an intriguing example of the image war that proclaimed and defended the then current religious regime. A complete new eld of research is uncovered by Jan Hallebeek who investigates seventeenth- and eighteenth century papal prohibitions against a particular way of depicting the Holy Trinity. After dealing with the historical developments prior to these papal prohibitions, he discusses the decree De invocatione (1563) of the Council of Trent which did not touch upon the image of the Holy Trinity. Especially, he focuses on the brief of Pope Benedict XIV, Sollicitudini Nostrae (1745). In order to put to a stop to certain monstrous excrescences in popular devotion, and to formulate an authoritative guideline, Benedict drew a distinction between three categories of the Trinity: those prohibited (monsters, gures with one body and three heads etc.), those tolerated (three more or less identical human gures) and those approved (the Trinity depicted in a vertical or horizontal way with God the Father as ‘ancient of days’, Christ as a human being and the Holy Spirit as dove or as tongues of re). Subsequently, Hallebeek discusses the implications of Benedict’s brief for ecclesiastical life and shows how in religious art—in spite of Benedict’s guidelines, the critical approach of images of the Trinity in circles of the Louvain Augustinism of Port Royal, including the decree of Council of Pistoia (1786–1787) to remove all images of the Trinity from the churches—the Holy Spirit continued to be depicted in a human form, while in popular art three-faced Trinities were still produced. Apparently, there was within the Catholic Church no longer room for the view that the Holy Trinity should not be depicted at all,

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although this opinion was based on undisputed theological premises, on authoritative writers. Modern Times Finally, this volume is completed by an examination of how iconoclasm has been debated in the modern period. It comprises a variety of modern iconoclastic phenomena, such as the ‘image wars’ of secularized political movements (nationalism), conicts between the traditional Roman Catholic Church and the Avant-garde in modern art as religiously inspired form of iconoclasm, and nally, the ‘written’ (iconoclastic) images of the divine in modern Dutch poetry. The rst essay by Angela Berlis compares two forms of the politics of representation in the nineteenth century: a secular and an ecclesiastical form. Using Willem Frijhoff’s distinction between idols, icons, and saints, in combination with Jan Assmann’s consideration of ‘cultural memory’, she explores the development of the cults and myths surrounding the protestant queen Luise of Prussia (1776–1810) on the one hand and the canonization in 1867 of the Ruthenian catholic archbishop Josaphat Kuncevycz (Kuncewycz, ca. 1580–1623) and the Spanish inquisitor Pedro de Arbués on the other hand. She analyses this development in terms of a social process, carried and supported by a particular group. Considering this process in terms of role models and in terms of the politics of representation, she comes to the surprising conclusion that the Prussian politics of representation of Luisa did not differ essentially from the politics of canonization regarding Kuncevycz under Pius IX. Both were intended to reinforce identity both internally and externally by offering a transcendental justication. She concludes her essay with a brief investigation played by the mass media in the shaping of such politics of representation. Christopher König discusses several paintings of Jesus produced for an 1896 Berlin art exhibition. They were created by well-known German artists for this occasion, among whom Franz von Stuck and Hans Thoma. Koenig traces the reception of these paintings in German Protestant periodicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He concentrates on the religious debate on a ‘modern’ image of Jesus in the period between secularization and religious renewal. At the same time, he investigates the role of nationalistic patterns that contributed to the debate on National Protestant attitudes in Wilhelmian Germany exemplied by an analysis of a ‘German Christ.’ From

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his analysis it becomes clear that a modernized image of Jesus was experienced to have a paradigmatic impact not only on the diverse and cultural and religious visions of liberal Protestantism, on various reform movements in Germany, but also on the radical nationalists of the ‘völkische Bewegung’. All these groups were linked by and contributed to, the formation of national identity in contrast to Judaism and the Catholics. Jaap Goedegebuure presents an essay on the written icon images of God in modern Dutch literature. He uses the notorious image of ‘God as donkey’ introduced by Gerard Reve as an example of the way heterodox images of the divine can clash with religious beliefs, dogmas, rules and conventions. Although iconoclashes may be of all times and places, he argues, nowhere is their manifestation as vehement as in the art and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the days of romanticism onwards artists and writers have been choosing images that closely connect to their deepest personal identity, thereby evoking a complete inversion of the qualities and values of conventional images of the divine and the sacred. He observes that in the eld of aesthetics this inversion manifests itself as a violating renewal of artistic norms and devices. At the same time, these new representations of the divine can be interpreted as projections, resembling the inner self. In the last part of his contribution Goedegebuure deals with two Dutch poets who looked upon all images of the divine as projections, without cherishing hope of being set free from these ‘Annoying Gods’ (Hans Faverey). These poets express the need for a denite and resolving iconoclasm, but in the end the reader observes once more a clash of endlessly re-emerging images. The author concludes by saying that this rapid change of position and the inversion of the usual hierarchy underline the inescapable and highly ambivalent character of religious projections. God is dealt with in an aggressive but still positive way. God is absent, but in his absence he still represents a one too many clashing icon. Theo Salemink addresses the conference theme by focusing on a conict between ultramontane Catholic Church leaders and the Avantgarde in the rst part of the twentieth century. According to Salemink, the Avant-garde movement presented itself as ‘a new iconoclasm’ and ‘a secular spirituality’. Initially, the Catholic Church condemned the movement as being a form of modern heresy and neo-paganism. After 1960, however, the Catholic Church changed its attitude and considered the spirituality of the Avant-garde as compatible. The author illustrates

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this international conict with a special case from Dutch history. In 1949 the Vatican ordered the bishop of Roermond, Mgr. G. Lemmens, to remove from the old chapel of Wahlwiller, in the south of the Netherlands, the Stations of the Cross painted by the young artist Aad de Haas in modern style. A Catholic fascist from pre-war time started a campaign in some Dutch Catholic media against De Haas, classifying his work as a form of ‘entartete Kunst’ and as a violation of the papal vision on art exposed in the encyclical letter Mediator Dei et Hominum (1947). More than thirty years later, in 1980, the Stations of the Cross were replaced in the chapel, but now with approval of the conservative bishop Mgr. Jo Gijsen. The bishop of Roermond called this work of art ‘a dream of the Resurrection’. From this, Salemink concludes that the 1949 intervention of the Vatican was an opportunistic move that had nothing to do with the biblical prohibition of images, but was inspired by the fear of ultramontane catholicism for the Avant-garde in art and for modern lifestyle. The nal contribution to this volume is written by Alexander Demandt in which he approaches the conference theme by an historical analysis of the phenomenon of vandalism—sacred and profane—as a form of ‘Kulturzerstörung’. He denes vandalism as the conspicious defacement and destruction of a structure or symbol against the will of the owner or the governing body. It can be done both as an expression of contempt or creativity, or both. Vandalism, he argues, only makes sense in a culture that recognizes history and archeology. Although originally an ethnic slur referring to Vandals, who sacked Rome in 455, the term was coined in 1794 during the French Revolution by Henri Baptiste Grégoire, bishop of Blois, in his report directed to the Republican Convention, where he used the word vandalism to describe the behaviour of the republican army. Gustave Courbets’s attempt, during the 1871 Paris Commune, to dismantle the Vendôme column, a symbol of the past Napoleon III authoritarian Empire, was one of the most celebrated events of vandalism. Perhaps, Demandt has borrowed the title of his contribution from Nietzsche, who meditated after the Commune on the ‘ght against culture’, taking as example the intentional burning of the Tuileries Palace on May 23, 1871. Throughout history the (ritual) destruction of monuments of a previous government or power has been one of the largest symbols, showing the attempt at transition of power. The author shows how the criminal ght against culture is only the reverse side of a criminal culture. For example, vandalism of Jewish properties and Jewish owned businesses was part of the criminal Nazi

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program, surfacing in the widespread coordinated vandalism of the Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938). Recent cases of vandalism in this vein, include the toppling and deconstruction of Soviet monuments, the Taliban destruction of Buddhist statuary in Afghanistan, and the well-known toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue in Iraq. We want to end this introduction by stating that all the essays in this volume articulate the importance of iconoclastic controversies and their impact on the process of creating religious identity. It includes a discussion of images in society and politics, philosophy and theology, rituals and liturgy, yesterday and today. We have little doubt that the debate on religious identity will continue and, therefore, this volume does not offer nal solutions. But at the same time we want to express our hope that the research done in this volume will contribute to a better understanding of the struggle for religious identity in past, present and (even) future. LITERATURE Boespug, F., ‘Apophatisme théologique et abstinence gurative. Sur l’«irréprésentabilité» de Dieu (le Père)’, in: Revue des sciences religieuses 72 (1998), 446–468. Buruma I., Margalit, A., Occidentalism. The West in the eyes of its enemies, New York, 2004. Drutt, M., Kazimir Malevich. Supprematism, New York, 2003, 89–95. Ferziger, A., Hierarchical Judaism in Formation: The Development of Central European Orthodoxy’s Approach Towards Non-Observant Jews (1700 –1918), Bar Ilan, 2001. Frishman, J., Otten, W., Rouwhorst, G., (eds), Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation. The Foundational Character of Authoritative Sources in the History of Christianity and Judaism, Leiden, 2004 ( Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series 8). Geest, P. van, Stellig maar onzeker. Augustinus’ benadering van God. Budel, 2007. Kandinsky, W., Complete writings on art, I (1901–1921), London 1982, 131–132, 219. Latour, B., Weibel, P., (eds), Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Karlsruhe, 2002. Latour, B., ‘What is Iconoclash? Or is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?’, in B. Latour, P. Weibel (eds), Iconoclash, 14–37. Jourdan, A., ‘Rituelen in de Franse Revolutie. Een geseculariseerde theologie?’, in: Groniek 36 (2003) 160, 277–290. Ley, M., Schoeps, J.H., (eds), Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion, Bodenheim b. Mainz, 1997, 151–207. ———, Genozid und Heilserwartung. Zum nationalsozialistischen Mord am Europäischen Judentum, Wenen, 1993. ———, Holocaust als Menschenopfer. Vom Christentum zur politischen Religion des Nationalsozialismus, Münster e.a., 2002. Pollmann, K., Doctrina christiana. Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina Christiana, Fribourg, 1996 (Paradosis 41).

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Poorthuis, M., ‘Het beeldenverbod: bron van humaniteit of bron van geweld?’, in: R. Burggraeve, J. de Tavernier, D. Pollefeyt, J. Hanssens (eds.), Van madonna tot Madonna. In de ban van beelden, idolen en afgoden, Leuven-Antwerpen, 2002, 70–71. Quaknin, M.-A., The Burnt Book. Reading the Talmud, New Jersey, 1995. Salemink, Th., ‘Nationaal-socialisme als politieke religie. Confrontatie met christendom en jodendom’, in Groniek 36 (2003) 160, 291–311. Schneider, B., Daniel Libeskind. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin, 1999. Weller, Chr., ‘Warum gibt es Feindbilder?’, in: J. Hippler, A. Lueg (eds), Feindbild Islam oder Dialog der Kulturen, Hamburg, 2002, 49–58.

PART ONE

WORD AND IMAGE: FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

1. THE TENSION BETWEEN WORD AND IMAGE IN CHRISTIANITY Willemien Otten (Utrecht University) Word, World and Image in Christianity: an Introduction By all accounts Christianity is considered a religion not just of the book, as Judaism and Islam are also, but more especially of the word. The beginning of the Gospel of John (1:1) reads: ‘In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The fact that Christianity is about the Word, or Logos, makes it also understandable that in its next phase it is to be considered a religion of words, of books, or better still: a religion featuring a whole library. Hence, we can follow how slowly but surely over the course of the rst few centuries of the Common Era the Bible came to form the pinnacle of divine revelation. While reecting the richness of divine revelation through its many words and books, the Bible is nevertheless thought to speak in all its pluriformity with the voice of the one Logos, who is there at the beginning and at the end, all the while articulating a single and coherent message (Smith 1995, 46).1 No words are holier than biblical words, no book more powerful, or any text more sacred than Holy Scripture (Schneiders 1988, 1–20).2 The centrality of the divine Word as representative of all the possible words in Christianity to the point of epitomizing them, subsequently gives rise to various inferences regarding the question whether the logocentric emphasis of Christianity does not exclude a prominent role for other media (Derrida

1 ‘For Christians, God’s central revelation is in the person of Christ, with the Bible as the record of that revelation’. Smith thus argues that the Bible never has the same apodeictic authority as Qur’an has in Islam. 2 See especially her comment on the attitude of the rst Christians towards Scripture, which she regards as not signicantly different from believing Jews: ‘Every word of the sacred text was pregnant with divine meaning and everything of religious signicance was expressed in the context of biblical categories and by means of biblical language’.

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1974; Otten 1997a, 247–260).3 Among these alternative media visual images rank rst, as it may well appear from this that they should be considered secondary to the Word. Upon reection we should rst of all ask the question whether the above inferences are indeed correct. But even if so, in relation to the problem of the internal coherence of the Christian message it should further be asked whether from a historical perspective we can say that, if such views were held some of the time, it follows that they must therefore be held all of the time. As one may perhaps expect from a historian of Christianity, regarding the latter problem I do not think that such notions as the Bible containing the Word of God par excellence and the priority of text over image have either gone unchallenged or remained unchanged during the course of Christian history [For an analysis of the early-medieval image controversy in the context of earlymedieval western theology: Otten 1997b, 3–51, esp. 9–24; Otten 2001, 65–82, esp. 70–73]. To illustrate this I want to move out of my usual concentration on early and medieval Christianity in the present essay to dwell on the respective contributions of Protestantism and Catholicism attempting especially to seek the difference in their respective positions. The central point I want to argue is that, all historical and typological variation notwithstanding, it is the tension between word and image rather than the centrality of the word or Logos as such that lies at the heart of Christianity. In my view this tension can ultimately be explained best as a by-product of Christian monotheism insofar as the Christian religion centers indeed on one eternal and transcendent God but one who chose to manifest himself in and through the timebound processes of creation and incarnation. Let me begin by clarifying the role of creation and incarnation a little further. As for the aspect of creation, its central importance stems from the fact that the Word is productive of the world. Gen. 1:1 reads: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’, and continues in Gen. 1:3: ‘God said: “Let there be light!” And there was light.’ These sentences illustrate sufciently that the world is called into being through the speaking of the Word. God actually manufactures material things

3 Derrida offers a critique and deconstruction of the logocentrism of Christianity, and indeed, of Western culture at large as ruling out ‘différance’ and xating reality in a ‘metaphysics of presence’. In an earlier article on Tertullian I have criticized the Derridean view of Christianity as inherent logocentric by pointing to the effect of incarnation.

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through the producing of words, as these convey the divine Word. Hence creation by word brings up the problem of material product and productivity, as to a certain extent creation equals fabrication. But at the same time it brings up the problem of hermeneutics, as the natural business of words is to generate meaning and signication. This brings us right away to the complex role of memory. Naturally the importance of memory is directly related to the practice of scriptural recitation and wider liturgical practice. But beyond that, it inevitably spills over into the realm of exegesis as well, as the power of Scripture is actualized and reactivated through each act of interpretation. Yet the words used in interpretation are by denition new ones, and as such productive of new webs of meaning, which then must somehow be reconnected to the familiar words of old, i.e., to Scripture itself. While the aspect of creation highlights the dual role of the divine Word as producing the world of material things and inaugurating verbal webs of meaning, the aspect of incarnation has a dual role of a rather different order. First, it brings out how the main connection between this world and the Word from which it springs is ultimately an anthropological one, marked by historical time and concretized in the life of Jesus Christ. Obviously, the central text here is John 1:14: ‘And the Word was made esh and dwelt among us.’ The anthropological aspect is especially important here, as it brings us back to the opening chapter of Genesis, where in 1:26 the rst man and woman are introduced as created in the image of God (imago Dei ). The notion of the Word becoming esh lends a kind of authority to humanity’s image-character but endows it at the same time with a sense of moral urgency. Most especially, it points to the dual role of Christ as both human and divine. In the early church Christ’s dual role seems to have created some confusion. Sometimes it seems the human person is seen as created in the image of Christ the Son rather than of God the Father, whereas at other times Christ is seen as the true image of God,4 with the human person being a reection of Christ. In view of Christianity’s soteriological dimension, the imaging of man after Christ makes the connection between the rst and the second Adam all but self-evident (Kannengiesser 1991). Of special importance in the context of this essay is that

4 Cf. the cosmic hymn of Col. 1:15: ‘Who is the image of the invisible God, the rstborn of every creature.’

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by seeing the image-character as an inherent feature of humanity we create room for the iconic alongside the verbal aspect right from the beginning of creation. After all, humans exist by the grace of their being created in the image of the divine. Yet the concept of incarnation reaches much further. To the extent that incarnation accommodates the encounter of creator and created, it embeds the entire realm of material images in that of verbal meaning and revelation. This leads me to my second point about incarnation. With the Word becoming esh, the eternal embraces the historical and the material in a way that does not thereby deny the rights of the latter, but opens up the interplay of the verbal and the material. Although the possibility of this encounter is rooted in and hence conditioned by the redemptive effect of the historic incarnation of Jesus Christ, it is not for this reason to be discarded as mere imitation or ‘second best’. The verbal and material can henceforth indeed meet. Their encounter would become primarily institutionalized in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist (Macy 1999), but it is also visible and tangible in the remarkable illustrated medieval Bibles known as Bibles Moralisées (see Hellemans, 2007). It is not unimportant that both eucharistic devotion and illustrated bibles ourished in the scholastic era, as there is a relation between the divisibility of the host, the endless rows of medallions in the Bibles Moralisées and the compartmentalized questions of scholastic method. The Tension of Word and Image in Protestant and Catholic Christianity To bring out the tension between word and image as a central feat of Christian history, I will briey reect on the Protestant and the Catholic position on images, after which I will draw some tentative conclusions as to the persistence of this tension and the possibility of solving it. Protestantism Regarding the movement of Protestantism, one is often alerted to the fact that it has been instrumental in highlighting anew the biblical focus of Christianity. Especially relevant in this context is the observation that the centrality of the word in Protestantism is directly tied to its iconoclastic emphasis, of which the Dutch ‘beeldenstorm’ of 1566 was an example. In my view, Protestantism indeed puts forth a new posi-

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tion concerning the tension between word and image on two counts, changing in the process the common perception of Christianity. First, Protestantism advocates a new view of the Bible which, especially when compared to earlier Christian history, seems to introduce what amounts to a kind of bibliolatry. By this I mean that it emphasizes the alterity of the biblical words to such an extent that their kèrygmatic and prophetic impact inevitably overshadows their evocative and allusive range, while its unique authority is frozen in being elevated beyond historical time (Gomes 1996, 25–52, esp. 39ff.). While this has the effect, or even advantage, of preserving the razorlike quality of biblical language, it has the counter effect of privileging its ‘blunt meaning’ with hammering force. It should be added that the latter holds especially true for Calvinism, as in Lutheranism there is a substantially more dynamic attitude of biblical receptiveness. Luther’s idea of ‘was Christum treibet’ makes for a Christological hermeneutical strategy which can open up the area of biblical hermeneutics, even if alternatively it can also lead to the problem of ascribing to a canon within the canon (Bayer 2004, 81–82). If we summarize the effect of the more confrontational approach to reading the Bible in Protestantism somewhat exaggeratedly with the phrase that ‘the letter vivies and the spirit kills’ (2 Cor. 3:6), it becomes clear that the evocative potential of allegory, symbolism and metaphor is substantially reined in. As a result of the constant insistence on the alterity of the biblical message, Protestantism tends to revere the Bible as a kind of sacrament or relic of the divine rather than seeing it as God’s interactive engagement with the world in speech. The term bibliolatry does not just emphasize its frozenness in alterity, like a Greek icon painted with words, but it also indicates to us the Bible’s powerful distance from the surrounding culture, as well as from any Logos prompting us after biblical times. Second, it needs little comment that the ercely iconoclastic attitude of Protestantism, at least as manifest in its early iconoclastic phase, has both privileged and been uniquely conditioned by Old Testament monotheism, which forbade that any images be made of God. The particular refutation of divine images in the Ten Commandments roots the rejection of idol-worship in the epiphany of the One God before his chosen people, be it Moses’s theophany at the burning bush or the ery column seen by the Jewish people in the desert. Here as elsewhere, then, Protestantism is naturally close to Judaism. In Protestantism and

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in Judaism alike the rejection of portraits of the divine is ultimately linked to the so-called fear of the lord (timor domini ) which, while accompanying all theophanies, is seen as the beginning of wisdom (cf. Psalm 111:10). Fear and divine intimidation led not just to awe and taboo regarding any depiction of the divine but, in a remarkable contrast, they also led to a new and heightened appreciation of the literary. It almost is as if the only way to offset the fear of the divine was by the sharp and vivid power of the human imagination. Emphasis on the biblical word did not just inaugurate a unidirectional rejection and suppression of the visual, therefore, but it rather gave way to a new way of reading, more mindful of the expressiveness of the letter, for which I tend to prefer the expression literal directness rather than literalism. Eventually, however, this kind of ‘literal directness’ could not last, as all reform movements are bound to become stied. It seems precisely in the niche that subsequently opened up between the Protestant rejection of any mediation between God and humanity and the intrinsic human need to call on some form of mediation that new patterns of reading began to be forged. For an unexpected example we may turn to the analysis in Peter Harrison’s book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (1998). Renaissance and reformation scholarship did not just converge in their attack on past authorities, Harrison’s book argues, but with its iconoclast—rather than iconoclastic—outlook, the reformation ‘made orphans of all natural objects’. No longer tied to the scholastic authority of Aristotle, Galen or Pliny, these objects became subjected to the literal modes of reading promoted by the Reformation. Through this refreshing attitude Harrison holds Protestantism to be instrumental in setting Europe on the path to modern science, as the reformed practice of literal reading produced new meaning not just in religion but also in the opinions held about the natural world. In line with this Harrison puts forth the view that in the seventeenth century natural science gained prestige in part by being useful religiously, thereby creating the modern concept of religion along the way (Harrison 2006, 493–510). In a twist of historical irony, this makes Darwinism ultimately a product of Protestantism, which in its more fundamentalist forms now seems to be among its chief opponents. While the above is an effect on the level of nature, there are remarkable scriptural results of the Protestant Reformation as well. Apart from the obvious emphasis on literal exegesis, I here want to point out how

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the concentrated way of reading that would arise also began to penetrate the realm of secular letters, shaping and moulding it. Although the Enlightenment may ultimately have spawned the eclipse of biblical narrative (cf. Frei 1974), I think that its effect was more that of re-channelling than suppressing biblical inuence. It is in a certain sense a testimony to the creativity and individualism of Protestantism that the end of biblical narrative did not prevent the Bible from entering freely into other cultural media. Its effect became noticeable rst of all in the novel while later it also entered the world of lm and cinematography, thus maintaining an important cultural function. But all that carries me far beyond my present task. What I would like to highlight here in a more general sense is indeed the heavy weight of the Bible, the reading of which was felt to be so awe-inspiring, provoking such overexposure, moreover, that the peculiar Protestant conguration of logocentrism inevitably resulted in bibliolatry. Catholicism In Catholicism, with which I include the pre-reformation era for the moment, the problems between image and text were of a rather different nature. Despite certain outbursts against the veneration of images, such as the iconoclast controversy in the Carolingian era which was primarily directed against the ecclesiastical hegemony of the East, on the whole their pedagogical function, permitting a kind of visual autonomy, does not seem to have posed a problem. Endowed with the authority of Pope Gregory the Great, as the words of tradition complemented those of Scripture, the role of images even seems to have been invited (Feld 1990, 11–14; Otten 1997b, 22 n. 60). As a result the material generally was not degraded compared to the verbal or the scriptural. Various indicators, such as the sacramental role of nature, the power of the cross, but especially of the Eucharist, which serves as an enduring legacy of the seamless integration of the verbal/scriptural and the material, underscore how the material in the Catholic tradition could be fully spirit-lled. As the example of the Eucharist shows, the centrality of the incarnation in spreading revelation is transferred to Christ’s passion and resurrection, without the soteriological need to focus on human redemption alone entailing the disqualication of the material, as is the Protestant tendency. Rather than being dominated by an iconoclastic attitude, Catholicism has seen a tendency to engage in symbolism, even to the point

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of saturation, with the entire universe becoming engaged in the chant of a cosmic liturgy. While a symbolist universe does not necessarily compromise the position of the monotheistic creator, there is the risk that the universe be turned into a set of paraphernalia. The problem of a Catholic worldview may be the fact that while the divide between creator and creation is in principle maintained, the gap between transcendence and immanence is not, giving rise to such problems as panentheism or pantheism. With Nature and Scripture seen as parallel sources of revelation, and the Bible and tradition somehow put on a par, the chief problem is how to prevent the created and material world from getting lost in a permanent play of images reecting each other instead of mirroring their divine source. How, in other words, can we draw a fair distinction between true and false images without dismissing visual/material representation as a legitimate reection of Christ’s incarnation altogether? To phrase it more poignantly, how can we separate icon from idol, with idolatry involving an essential misattribution of authorship? Put differently, the problem that seems to loom largest in Catholicism is the problem of idolatry, more specically, that of image as icon versus image as idol.5 By idolatry here I rather refer to the practice of grafting all images onto the power of reason as abstracted from God’s self-revelation inspiring the living tradition of the church. When icon becomes idol, there is no longer the possibility of correction from the side of a living tradition in which it is embedded but not enclosed, no longer room for revelation as gift. In this regard there seems to be a direct correspondence in Catholicism between the notion of idolatry and that of heresy. In both cases the notable tension between the embrace of a symbolist universe on the one hand and the need to guard the uncontaminated legacy of the church on the other seems in the end solvable only through apodeictic and premature judgments. Jean-Luc Marion’s seminal book God without Being (1991) offers us an interesting and rather sophisticated case in point, as he construes the notion of icon/idol beyond the realm of the visual, pushing it into the arena of postmodern philosophy and theology. He sees icons and idols not as two classes of beings, but as two manners of being for beings. The idol is the landing strip of the gaze, referring it to human

5 I leave the role of saints and of the Virgin Mary outside this debate, but obviously in Protestant eyes their intercessory role comes close to idolatry as well.

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measure, whereas the icon makes visible by giving rise to an innite gaze. Marion holds the view that in the Catholic Church being itself (esse) had become isolated, encapsulated, magnied, ‘idolized’, thereby stiing the development of tradition. Leaving classical Thomism behind, and only partly satised by Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics, Marion redirects us to the older, premodern recesses of ecclesiastical tradition, advocating a more subtle and nuanced position whose conceptual structure is open to the self-revelation of the divine. For all the sympathy that I have for Marion’s position, for his attempt to focus on theo-logy rather than on theo-logy, and especially for allowing the breezes of negative theology to blow through the scholastic lecture halls, his position in the end appears marked by the same premature judgments that his search for proper icons avowed to avoid. His emphasis on the role of bishops as theologians par excellence makes his position in the end vulnerable for apologetic tendencies and hence not fail-safe with regard to new idolatrous development. While he may indeed have opened the doors to the tradition, he has not done so to the church (Marion 1991, 153–156). From Protestant-Catholic Esthetics to Patristic Testimony Rather than passing judgment on which tradition is to be favoured on the right balance between text and image, we should perhaps leave room for the fact that what we are dealing with here may in the end come down to differences of an esthetic nature. To illustrate this I quote without further comment from William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, rst published in 1902 ( James 1961, 358–59): Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. . . . The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy . . . is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of ‘childlike’—innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of

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willemien otten the dear people’s intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hardeyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other—their centres of emotional energy are too different.

If no agreement can be reached on the difference between the Protestant and the Catholic positions on purely esthetic grounds, and if these grounds indeed underlie or even constitute much of our theological reasoning, it might be useful to follow Marion and turn to the premodern tradition. I do so not because the premodern tradition predates the divide between Protestantism and Catholicism, for a case could well be made that the Carolingian iconoclastic position foreshadows certain Protestant sensibilities, as Calvin was an avid supporter of the thencalled Libri Carolini. The insistence of their author, bishop Theodulf of Orléans, that Moses recorded the origin of the world through writing rather than through painting, belying incidentally the later deus artifex of the Bibles Moralisées, that Jesus drew rather than painted with his nger in the sand,6 and that the Bible contains no impure words or thoughts, thus far transcending pagan wisdom, speak volumes and culminate in the injunction to forego material images because humanity is created in the image of God (Otten 1997b, 12–23). Neither is my turn to premodernity motivated by the fact that it can offer us an acceptable answer to the stale self-perceptions of both traditions or to the threat of postmodernism. My intent or hope, rather, is that it may give us the opportunity to redraw the terms of the debate with fresh insight. Instead of depicting the relationship of word and image primarily from the perspective of the traditions in which we nd ourselves, be it ecclesiastical loyalties or the vested interests of academic scholarship, I want to start from a set of texts that not just predate the confessional divide but show an awareness of the question at hand without being so overwhelmed by it as to make us lose all control over it. This is not to say that premodern texts are not sensitive to the precariousness of the relationship between Word and Image, but their rootedness in a

6 The Libri Carolini have since received the more historic title Opus Caroli. The example of Moses writing rather than painting the origin of the world and Jesus writing rather than drawing with his nger in the sand are found in OC II.30, Freeman 305–06.

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larger integrative vision overrides any need to cut short development through premature judgment (Clark 2004, 156–185).7 The example that presents itself as most suitable and fullling in my opinion, not least because it appeals to Protestant and Catholic esthetic sensibilities alike, is the worldview arising from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine with its famous distinction between signum and res. I will therefore end this essay with a few brief statements of its take on the matter of word and image. More particularly, I will use Augustine to formulate some general rules on what I consider a desired balance in the relationship between text and image in Christianity. Between Iconoclasm and Idolatry: Three Augustinian Rules on the Relation of Word and Image In his On Christian Doctrine, with which he replaces his original idea conceived after his conversion to rethink the entire encyclopaedia of the liberal arts, Augustine sets out to think through the interpretation of the Scriptures: how one can come up with rules to interpret them; how one rst nds those rules and afterwards communicates them. Generally, the rst three books are about the modus inveniendi, the nding of the rules and the last about the modus proferendi, the putting forth of what one has learnt. In concentrating the entire span of his attention on Christian teaching, however, Augustine combines the elements of meditation and performance right from the start, rooting both in the reading of the Bible.8 The rst rule I want to distil from Augustine is that even the Word itself cannot do without auxiliary signs in being properly mediated. ‘All teaching is teaching of either things or signs, but things are learnt through signs’ (On Christ. Doctr. I.II.2.4).9 Upon being properly unpacked this dense sentence shows us the whole dynamics of Word and world in a nutshell. Interestingly, Augustine starts out here by framing the Word as something that requires mediation, as it has to be taught (omnis

7 The recent ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography has special importance in enabling us to read premodern texts in the context of doing intellectual history beyond confessional resonances. 8 It is well-known that book IV was written later than the rst books and circulated separately during medieval times, but I do not want to see it disconnected to the other books for that reason. 9 Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa discuntur (Green, 12).

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doctrina). No bibliolatry here, even though his true subject matter is exegetical (tractare scripturam), for the centrality of the Word itself opens up into the presentation of a larger cultural vision. No bibliolatry in another sense as well, to the extent that the Word contains also visual and material signs, for Scripture tells us about numerous material things that point far beyond themselves to the presence of God, like the stone which Jacob uses for a pillow in Gen. 28, but also no logocentrism, for ultimately even the biblical words themselves are signs. The instrumental and functional approach to words as verbal signs applies to the words of Scripture no less than to the words used to explain them, as both are joined in the same meditative and mediating program.10 More importantly, Augustine ultimately aligns words and signs, as both are equally called upon in the service of discovering things, but not necessarily in any ranked order. Without going into further detail here, it is important to note, furthermore, that for Augustine the only true thing (res) really worth enjoying is the Trinity,11 as even in reecting upon God himself he puts the divine Word in context, i.e., in a company that is equally divine. What purpose one has in explaining the Scriptures is ultimately of the utmost importance. Here the second major division in On Christian Doctrine plays a crucial part, i.e., between uti (to use) and frui (to enjoy), which will lead me to my second rule. I start with Augustine’s statement: ‘To enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake. To use something is to apply whatever it may be to the purpose of obtaining what you love—if indeed it is something that ought to be loved’ (De doctrina christiana I.iv.4.8).12 A few inferences follow from this. The rst is that signs can never be enjoyed, only things can, and the second that enjoyment by denition involves love. It is tempting to connect this to the famous exegetical rule of love that Augustine has formulated in Book III. There he states that in determining whether to choose a literal or a gurative exegesis, one must see whether the literal interpretation promotes the love of God and neighbour. If not, then one should prefer a gurative reading. Sound exegesis is closely linked to ethical standards here, whereas false interpretation is marked by its undue focus on cupidity 10 See Stock (2001) for the aftermath of Augustine’s meditative program on western reading practices. 11 See De doctrina christiana. I.v.5.10, Green 16. 12 Frui est enim amore inhaerere alicui rei propter se ipsam; uti autem, quod in usum venerit ad id quod amas obtinendum referre, si tamen amandum est (Green, 14).

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and self-love.13 The distinction between uti and frui has thus often been interpreted with an eye towards promoting right moral behaviour. The middle position in which human beings nd themselves has been singled out as an especially difcult quandary: are one’s fellow human beings merely to be used, in the service of God, or to be enjoyed, as fellow seekers of God?14 What is easily forgotten then, is that for Augustine the rule of love overrides any other interpretive goals, with one’s ethics embedded in one’s hermeneutics. This is also clear from the fourth book of On Christian Doctrine, which dwells more on the proportionate use of styles in swaying one’s hearers than on their moral conformity and I therefore see this indeed as the second rule to be derived from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. Right interpretation must be directed towards alterity, and love of God and neighbor provides Augustine with the clear aim of the Scriptures. Does this second rule seem to point to the need for community-based exegesis, the third rule to which I want to draw attention here, seems to turn this impression upside down or at least put it into brackets, putting the interpreter back into the centre. This third rule has to do with the relevance of the ambiguous signs, the so-called signa ambigua. The fact that Augustine dwells on these at considerable length relativizes his view that Scripture is there only to teach others,15 and brings us back to the famous injunction at the end of Confessions VIII instigating his own conversion: ‘Pick up and read’ (Stock 1996). For Augustine Christianity puts one between the divine command to read and the perennial problem of facing ambiguous signs when doing so. For that the only solution is to be committed to accept signs as signs, including the words of Scripture. In between the confusion of distinguishing between literal and metaphorical interpretation, the lifting of which requires hard and precise exegetical work, and the divine injunction to read Scripture if necessary even against the grain as its only legitimate goal is the promotion of love, lies the human relishing in putting together things and signs, keeping them in balance by making use of images (similitudines). Why that is, Augustine professes in On Christian Doctrine II.vi.8.13 not to know:

13 This so-called regula caritatis is found in On Christ. Doctr. III.x.14.33–16.38, Green 146–48. 14 See De doctrina christiana I.xxii.20.39 (Green 28) on the question whether humans should enjoy each other, use each other or both. 15 See ibidem. I.xxxix.43.93, Green 52.

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willemien otten Exactly why this picture gives me greater pleasure than if no such imagery were presented by the divine books, since the topic is the same, and the lesson the same, it is difcult to say; this, however, is another question entirely. But no-one disputes that it is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difculty.16

The very fact that Scripture itself contains these images (similitudines), and goes beyond mere reason, is apparently sufcient reason for Augustine to accept them. But why he relishes in them, he does not know and considers another matter altogether (alia quaestio est). Still, the fact that the human mind, without falling into the trap of curiosity, is free to take pleasure in these images, provides him clearly with a kind of proleptic enjoyment, an enjoyment pointing ahead to the beatic vision itself. Conclusion: Embracing the Pictorial The case of Augustinian exegesis is relatively straightforward compared to the matter at hand, i.e., the complex relationship between word and image. Augustine clearly notes and accepts the use of similitudines in bringing the message of the Bible home. What we are now left with is the problem of how to go from there to the use of the pictorial, the embrace of the iconic, from the mental to the visual and material image, without running the risk of turning icon into idol? Here it seems to me that Augustine is unexpectedly positive when we compare him, for example, to Theodulf of Orléans. For Theodulf, the written quality of the Scriptures combined with the human person seen as image of God, and Christ’s role as image par excellence, rules out any and all constructive use for images. Their material quality inuences their mediating function negatively by drawing too much attention to the mediating instance rather than to what it was that was being mediated and remembered (Opus Caroli II.22, Freeman 277). The rich and the poor would be divided and the Augustinian unity of the

16 ‘Sed quare suavius videam quam si nulla de divinis libris talis similitudo promeretur, cum res eadem sit eademque cognitio, difcile est dicere et alia quaestio est. Nunc tamen nemo ambigit et per similitudines libentius quaeque cognosci et cum aliqua difcultate quaesita multo gratius inveniri. Qui enim prorsus non inveniunt quod quaerunt, fame laborant; qui autem non quaerunt, quia in promptu habent, fastidio saepe marcescunt. In utroque autem languor cavendus est.’ (Green, 62)

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church broken up, because wealthy people can by denition make more opulent statues than simple folk. Augustine, on the contrary, by choosing to focus on the Word, and not on God or on theophanic revelation but by seeing words primarily as signs, allows and invites us to accept all signs, thereby implicitly including and sanctioning other than verbal ways of mediation: images, the senses, the body. Until the beatic vision is a reality, one can indeed hope to encounter God through all earthly means. And nothing should prevent us from doing so. LITERATURE Primary Literature Augustinus, Aurelius, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green, Oxford 1995. Theodulf of Orléans, Opus Caroli Regis contra Synodum (Libri Carolini), ed. A. Freeman and P. Meyvaert, Hanover 1997. MGH. Concilia. Tomus II Supplementum II. Secundary Literature Bayer, O., Martin Luthers Theologie, Tübingen, 2004 (sec.ed.). Clark, E.A., History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Cambridge MA, 2004. Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, 1974. Feld, H., Der Ikonoklasmus des Westens, Leiden, 1990. Frei, H.W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, New Haven, 1974. Gomes, P.J., The Good Book. Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, New York, 1996. Harrison, P., The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Cambridge 1998. ———, ‘Miracles, Early Modern Science, and Rational Religion,’ Church History 75, 2006. Hellemans, B.S., La forme et l’objet du Livre. Une lecture dynamique des Bibles moralisées du XIII e siècle, diss. Utrecht 2006. Hellemans, B., ‘A Shapeless Earth. Decoding Visual Art in Medieval Bibles’, in: W. van Asselt, P. van Geest, D. Müller, Th. Salemink (eds), Iconoclash and Iconoclasm. Struggle for Religious Identity, Leiden, 2007. James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York, 1961. Kannengiesser, C., ‘Athanasius of Alexandria and the Foundation of Traditional Christology’, Theological Studies 34 (1973) 103–113. Reprinted in: C. Kannengiesser, Arius and Athanasius. Two Alexandrian Theologians, Aldershot, 1991. Macy, G., Treasures from the Storeroom. Medieval Religion and the Eucharist, Collegeville, 1999. Marion, J.-L., God Without Being, trans. Th.A. Carlson, Chicago, 1991. Otten, W., ‘Christ’s Birth of a Virgin Who Became a Wife: Flesh and Speech in Tertullian’s De carne Christi,’ Vigiliae Christianae 50, 1997 (= Otten, 1997 a). ———, ‘The Texture of Tradition: The Role of the Church Fathers in Carolingian Theology,’ in: Irena Backus (ed.), Theological Innovation and the Shaping of Tradition. The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West from the Carolingians to the Maurists, Leiden 1997 (= Otten, 1997b).

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———, ‘Carolingian Theology’, in: G.R. Evans (ed), The Medieval Theologians. An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period, Oxford, 2001. Schneiders, S., ‘Scripture and Spirituality’, in: B. McGinn, J. Meyendorff, J. Leclercq (eds), Christian Spirituality. Origins to the Twelfth Century, New York, 1988. Smith, W.C., What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach, Minneapolis 1993. Stock, B., Augustine the Reader. Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation, Cambridge 1996. ———, After Augustine. The Meditative Reader and the Text, Philadelphia, 2001.

2. THE DIALECTICS OF THE ICON: A REFERENCE TO GOD? Anton Houtepen (Utrecht University) Introduction In our highly visualised global culture, icons and idols, logo’s, signs and symbols, images and pictures are everywhere. Looking up the item ‘icon’ with the search-engine Google on the internet results in more than 37 million hits, for ‘symbol’ we nd 28 million sites, for ‘idol’ more than two million, mainly referring to celebrities, and for ‘logo’ nearly one million. Many of these are, consciously or unconsciously, ‘branded’ on our retina and create a symbolical universe which is guiding us in daily life from early morning trafc unto late night television programs. Using a computer means to work with standard icons and symbols on the screen. Symbols and signs are marking our landscapes and cities by billboards, grafti and advertisements. It is like the return of the hieroglyphs or the characters of the Asian languages: we use shortcuts for quite complex sets of references, emotions, mindsets, actions, relations and imaginations. In her bestseller No Logo, the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has warned us against the dangers of manipulation, implied in global marketing and branding strategies (Klein, 1999; de Maeseneer, 2003, 1–14). With their popular logo’s companies like Nike, Adidas, McDonalds or Boss have monopolized quite a few patterns of the daily life of their worldwide users and consumers, they even have become part of their personal image or identity. Icons, therefore are not innocuous nor innocent. Religions, likewise, have constructed a world of symbols and signs, icons and idols in order to refer to, to perform or to participate in what, with various names, has been called the divine, the sacred, the holy, the mystery of life, summarized as religious experience. Both in polytheistic and in monotheistic religions, this imagined world or symbolical universe of idols and icons, signs and symbols may lead to the temptation to take the symbol for its referential content, to identify res et signum or vice versa (Chauvet, 1988). A most prominent example of

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such temptation is the identication of the text of the Bible or the Quran with the direct Word of God in a biblicist reading of Holy Scriptures, which seems to make any contextual or hermeneutical relecture of ancient texts impossible. Another, culturally very inuential case was the paradoxical ‘materialisation’, mainly through iconography, of God’s biblical and quranic messengers into a class of really existing spiritual beings, the ‘angels’ or their evil counterparts: ‘demons’, ‘spirits’, ‘devils’. Even more striking are the iconographic ‘portraits’ of the invisible God in Christian pictorial art from late medieval times onward, on the basis of apocalyptic vision scenes in the Bible like those in the Book of Daniel and in John’s Revelation. Tradition has labelled such confusion and identication of res et signum idolatry, superstition, fetishism. Idolatry consists in the reication of the divine and the holy in sacred objects, sacred statues, sacred temples, sacred times, sacred texts and sacred persons. To prevent such identication, to critically reect on the distance between the sign and the signied, idolatry had to be laid bare and criticized time and again.1 This is the fundamental iconoclash, which lies behind all historic iconoclasms, both in the context of religion, of art and aesthetics, of science and of political ideology. In our actual postmodern philosophical mood and mode we have called this iconoclash de-construction. De-construction does not only refer to the world of symbolical imagination, but to the world of mental imagery, conceptualisation and text-production as well. Modern iconoclasms, like the dramatic toppling of the idols, e.g. of the sacrosanct statues of dictators like Lenin and Stalin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or of Saddam Hussein in Irak during the Second Gulf war in 2003 implied such conceptual iconoclashes as well and went hand in hand with the demolition and deconstruction 1 Idolatry, thus, is not rst and foremost a qualication of the ‘false belief ’ of people of other faiths, especially of polytheistic religions, but a self-critical term about religious aberration within monotheism itself. Ex. 20, 1–26 must be read as a whole: no material image may be identied with the divine, no personal interest may supersede the dignity and rights of other creatures, no alien Gods may be revered nor may economic prot overrule the divine ordering of creation in times of work and in time of rest, no permanent hardcore altars are allowed, no special sanctuaries or elevated places to suggest God’s presence ‘up there’ high in the sky: to climb the stages of such high-altars would mean the exhibition of the human genitals! (Ex. 20, 26). God’s blessings will be everywhere, where people name God according to a divine appeal (cf. the story of Jacob’s dream in Gen. 28). No temple nor pantheon is needed, because creation itself is the dwelling place of God, manifested in clouds and re, water and wind of nature and in breath and blood, heart and mind of all the living creatures.

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of their ideas: political traditions and conventions were unmasked as fatal ideologies, appearances and mere shine. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York of 9/11 2001 was interpreted by many as a dramatic iconoclasm on Western economic idolatry by radical and ruthless Muslims. Monotheism: God beyond Being and the Prohibition of Images Monotheistic religions confess the invisibility, ineffability but at the same time the epiphany and self-revelation of God through words and actions by prophets and messengers, crystallized in their holy scriptures and transmitted through a symbolical universe of feasts calendars, liturgical rites, social institutions, doctrines and artefacts. These ‘structures de longue durée’ commemorating past and performing present religious experience make the reality of God a transcendent reality, i.e. a form of being that is ‘hors-catégorie’: no material nor anthropomorphic personal categories apply to the being of this God, who is ‘totaliter aliter’ i.e. different from all other forms of being, or even without or beyond being (Marion, 1991; 1977). The prohibition to make material images ( pèsèl) of God and the divine out of stone, wood, metal or clay and in form of cosmic, animal or human gures in order to revere them, central to Judaism (Ex. 20,4–6 (= Deut. 5,8–10); 34,14.17, Lev. 19,4; Deut. 4,16–19; Jes. 40,19; 44,10), but faithfully taken up by Early Christianity and Islam, was meant to guarantee such divine transcendence. God’s being is so different from all other things, ideas or names we come across in reality, that we must label this form of being with quite a series of negations: invisible, innite, unfathomable, incomprehensible, ineffable or in rather spatial expressions: unsurpassable, illocaliter in loco, unmoved mover. Or we must qualify it by some, only seemingly positive qualications like: all encompassing, omnipresent, transcendent, immanent, almighty, absolute. All three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam confess God’s invisibility and characterize the divine and the sacred as nally beyond any categorical identication, be it in words or in images. In later Judaism not even God’s name was mentioned in prayer and liturgy and substituted by anonymous expressions like Adonai or Shem (= the Name) or even simply by four dots. The biblical prohibition to make concrete images, however, did not prevent human imagination and conceptualisation of the divine. The three Abraham traditions produced a rich vocabulary to refer to divine

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will and activity and to the epiphany, revelation and presence of God by way of mental images and symbols, metaphors and scenarios, stories and rituals, crystallized in their holy scriptures. In contrast to Judaism and Islam,2 and in spite of the prohibition of images in the Old Testament and in the Early Church of the rst and second centuries, later Christianity did not withhold Christian artists from painting, sculpting and lming quite a world of representations of the divine and of humans in relation to God. Pope Gregory the Great coined the main argument for Christian pictorial art by calling the biblical scenes on mosaics and frescoes in the churches the ‘books of the illiterate’ or biblia pauperum.3 In Eastern Christianity those who wanted to venerate icons—the iconodouloi—won the battle after much struggle from those who were opposed to it—the iconoclasts—at the Second Council of Nicea in 787 CE. This council accepted a rather materialist explanation of Exodus 20,4: carved idols and statues of stone, wood, metal or clay were forbidden as from old,4 two-dimensional representations like mosaics, frescoes and icons on wood were allowed and even propagated for catechetical instruction and devotional praxis, on the understanding that they were not adored (latreia, proskunèsis) but

2 Neither in Judaism nor in Islam we nd an absolute prohibition of religious pictorial art as such. In the Jerusalem temple the cherubs had a prominent place, in synagogues pictures of the zodiac are quite common. See A.J. Avery-Peck, 2000, 434–443. For Islam, see: S. Naef, 2004. 3 Gregory the Great (540–604) wrote that ‘it is not without reason that in the older Churches the lives of the saints were depicted in paintings . . . what Scripture is for the literate, so the image is for the illiterate . . . images are the books of those who do not know the Scriptures’ (Letters, IX, 209). It is, therefore their catechetical value, especially for non-believers and catechumens, that has been most prominent in the West. 4 Nicea II did not even mention the possibility of statues. The rst distinction between eidolon and eikoon seems to date from the 4th century: Epiphanius, Fragment 6. See: Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE ), Vol. 6, De Gruyter, Berlin etc. 1980, 525f. Irenaeus is against any image: Adversus. Haereses I, 25, 6. See: Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica. VII, 18. Christian imagery (paintings, symbols) we meet only from mid 3rd century onwards (TRE 6, 527). Within Islam we nd a similar distinction between two-dimensional pictures and statues: cf. C. Glassé, 2001, s.v. ‘Images’, 212–213: ‘On the basis of Hadith, the making of images is prohibited in Islam; those who make them will, on the Day of Judgement, be told ‘to breathe the life into what they have created’ and, failing to do so, will be punished. The degree to which the religious authorities censure images differs, however, according to whether the images are of a living thing—an important distinction is made between depictions of vegetable and animal life—whether they are on a at surface, or representations which ‘have a shadow’, that is, statues.’

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only venerated.5 The Council of Frankfurt 794 did reject these decisions, probably on the basis of a false reading of the Acts of Nicea II, prohibiting the adoration of the icons, but not intending to disqualify their veneration (Hartmann, 1988, 307–324; Thümmel, 1997, vol. 2, 965–980). The veneration of the saints through images was not abandoned in the West either, on the contrary. Ex. 20, 4–6 became interpreted even less strictly than in the East: carved sculptures in relief began to appear in the tradition of Romanic art and architecture soon after Carolingian times, which thereupon gave rise to Gothic deep relief. Finally statues on socles came out of pillars and walls and moved into the open on church squares or even went high up upon hills and mountains above the city, like in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil or Dili in Timor. From medieval times their images of wood, clay, stone or metal were taken out in processions along the streets of the European cities and villages, a custom

5 The decision of Nicea II reads: ‘To summarize, we declare that we defend free from any innovations all the—written and—unwritten ecclesiastical traditions that have been entrusted to us. One of these is the production of representational art; this is quite in harmony with the history of the spread of the gospel, as it provides conrmation that the becoming man of the Word of God was real and not just imaginary, and as it brings us a similar benet. For, things that mutually illustrate one another undoubtedly possess one another’s message. Given this state of affairs and stepping out as though on the royal highway, following as we are the God-spoken teaching of our holy fathers and the tradition of the catholic church—for we recognize that this tradition comes from the holy Spirit who dwells in her—we decree with full precision and care that, like the gure of the honoured and life-giving cross, the revered and holy images, whether painted or made of mosaic or of other suitable material, are to be exposed in the holy churches of God, on sacred instruments and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and by public ways, these are the images of our Lord, God and saviour, Jesus Christ, and of our Lady without blemish, the holy God-bearer, and of the revered angels and of any of the saintly holy men. The more frequently they are seen in representational art, the more are those who see them drawn to remember and long for those who serve as models, and to pay these images the tribute of salutation and respectful veneration. Certainly this is not the full adoration (latria) in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature, but it resembles that given to the gure of the honoured and life-giving cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred cult objects. Further, people are drawn to honour these images with the offering of incense and lights, as was piously established by ancient custom. Indeed, the honour paid to an image traverses it, reaching the model, and he who venerates the image, venerates the person represented in that image.’ The following anathema’s were added: ‘1. If anyone does not confess that Christ our God can be represented in his humanity, let him be anathema. 2. If anyone does not accept representation in art of evangelical scenes, let him be anathema. 3. If anyone does not salute such representations as standing for the Lord and his saints, let him be anathema.’ Greek text in: H. Denzinger/A. Schönmetzer, 600–603. English translation taken from Marini, 2005.

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still alive in many places around the world and a welcome feature for popular piety if not for tourism. The Coming out of the Saints This coming out of the saints and their veneration in ecclesiastical feasts and processions on their dies natalis, their birthday into eternity, meant their stepping down from their eternal, immortal life into the life of the Christian communities as their patrons and ancestors in the faith, not unlike the functioning of ancestors in African, Asian and Native American cultures. The regular commemoration of the saints and the prayers for their intercession in all kinds of human concern, made them alive and visible in a communion of the saints. Such communion comprised both the earthly struggling, the post mortem suffering and the heavenly triumphant church and became alive through the symbolical universe of icons, frescoes, paintings and statues, candles or incense burned before them and hymns sung or offerings brought to them. At the same time their ‘coming out’ in solemn processions ( pro-cedere) symbolized the paradox of death in Christian life: their dead bodies of stone or wood, crowned by golden or silver aureoles, referred to their heavenly state as martyrs and confessors of the true faith and to the unsurpassable border of earth and heaven. Thus they expressed and for many still express the fundamental liminal experience and the aporia of our mortality. In John of Damascus’ treatise On the Enemies of the Icons this fundamental aporia and paradox is only solved by his reference to the incarnation of the divine in the human esh of Jesus. The imaging of God self is forever forbidden, but the epiphany of God in the human fate, represented by the face and body of Jesus, may be pictured in paintings on wood. It was precisely about the understanding of the incarnation and in fact about the interpretation of the compromise formula of Chalcedon 451—vere homo, vere Deus —that the struggles in mid-eight century in Byzantium were all about.6 John of Damascus (Mansur) was

6 P. Halsall (ed.), Medieval Sourcebook: John of Damascus: In Defence of Icons. (730). The iconoclastic controversy lasted from 726, when Emperor Leo III (717–741) began an attack on the use of religious images, until 843 when the Empress Theodora allowed their restoration. The two periods of iconoclasm were separated by the reign of the iconodoule Empress Irene, under whom the Second Council of Nicea 787 was held. Although politics, and especially the politics of church and state were involved, there

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condemned by the 754 Imperial Synod of Constantinople (later called pseudo-synod or concionabulum by its opponents) for having betrayed the mystery of the incarnation. John, appealing to the humanity of Jesus Christ in defending the making of images, would have, thus, undermined Jesus’ divinity and the gure of Christ, the Son of God and the Second Person of the Trinity, whereas the Second Council of Nicea 787 honoured and rehabilitated him for precisely having defended the full humanity and divinity of Christ: the icons depict the man Jesus, the fathers of Nicea II said, but by their non-likeness and by their veneration they refer to the divine nature of Christ: ‘visible things are images of invisible and intangible things, on which they throw a faint light’. The icons nd their true likeness in the praying attitude and the religious behaviour of those who venerate them. The iconostasis, therefore, is both the screen and the gateway to heaven in Orthodox liturgical understanding, just as it is the absence and presence of the Risen Christ which shines through his human body, like depicted in the icon of the transguration on Mount Tabor. Through the icon Jesus’ transguration is commemorated by faith, Christ’s transgured body is venerated and adored, not the picture itself. John of Damascus defends the making and veneration of images by comparing it to the production and veneration of the tabernacle, the cherubs and the temple ornaments in the book of Exodus and he honours matter as part of creation, though it is not as such, divine.7 His defence of the

were serious theological issues at stake. A great number of treatises were written to the defence of the icons. They argued from the existence of divinely approved images in nature and in Scripture; they were based on the reality of the incarnation or appealed to Platonic metaphysics according to which any image exists only by participating in its prototype and never replaces it or may fully represent it. St. John of Damascus (c. 675–c. 749) was able to write freely since he lived under Muslim rule outside the boundaries of the Byzantine empire. About the incarnation John wrote: ‘Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in esh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honouring that matter which works my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God. How could God be born out of lifeless things? And if God’s body is God by union, it is immutable. The nature of God remains the same as before, the esh created in time is quickened by, a logical and reasoning soul.’ (On Holy Images, transl. by Mary H. Allies (London, Thomas Baker, 1898), 10–17). Cf. Th. Nikolaou, 1976, 138–165. 7 ‘We see images in creation which remind us faintly of God, as when, for instance, we speak of the holy and adorable Trinity, imaged by the sun, or light, or burning rays, or by a running fountain, or a full river, or by the mind, speech, or the spirit

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icons and exposition of the idea of the incarnation must be read as a Byzantine apologetics against the polemics of Islam (Khoury, 1979, 242–300; 1980, 132–174; 1982, 14–49). Analogical Imagination According to David Tracy theology reects upon the analogical imagination underlying prayer and the liturgy, religious community, human

within us, or by a rose tree, or a sprouting ower, or a sweet fragrance. (. . .) Again, an image is expressive of something in the future, mystically shadowing forth what is to happen. For instance, the ark represents the image of Our Lady, Mother of God, so does the staff and the earthen jar. The serpent brings before us Him who vanquished on the Cross the bite of the original serpent; the sea, water, and the cloud the grace of baptism. Again, things which have taken place are expressed by images for the remembrance either of a wonder, or an honour, or dishonour, or good or evil, to help those who look upon it in after times that we may avoid evils and imitate goodness. It is of two kinds, the written image in books, as when God had the law inscribed on tablets, and when He enjoined that the lives of holy men should be recorded and sensible memorials be preserved in remembrance; as, for instance, the earthen jar and the staff in the ark. So now we preserve in writing the images and the good deeds of the past. Either, therefore, take away images altogether and be out of harmony with God, who made these regulations, or receive them with the language and in the manner which bets them. (. . .) But besides this: who can make an imitation of the invisible, incorporeal, uncircumscribed, formless God? Therefore to give form to the Deity is the height of folly and impiety. And hence it is that in the Old Testament the use of images was not uncommon. But after God in His bowels of pity became in truth man for our salvation, not as He was seen by Abraham in the semblance of a man, nor as He was seen by the prophets, but in being truly man, and after He lived upon the earth and dwelt among men, worked miracles, suffered, was crucied, rose again and was taken back to Heaven, since all these things actually took place and were seen by men, they were written for the remembrance and instruction of us who were not alive at that time in order that though we saw not, we may still, hearing and believing, obtain the blessing of the Lord. But seeing that not every one has a knowledge of letters nor time for reading, the Fathers gave their sanction to depicting these events on images as being acts of great heroism, in order that they should form a concise memorial of them. Often, doubtless, when we have not the Lord’s passion in mind and see the image of Christ’s crucixion, His saving passion is brought back to remembrance, and we fall down and worship not the material but that which is imaged: just as we do not worship the material of which the Gospels are made, nor the material of the Cross, but that which these typify. For wherein does the cross, that typies the Lord, differ from a cross that does not do so? it is just the same also in the case of the Mother of the Lord. For the honour which we give to her is referred to Him Who was made of her incarnate. And similarly also the brave acts of holy men stir us up to be brave and to emulate and imitate their valour and to glorify God. For as we said, the honour that is given to the best of fellow-servants is a proof of goodwill towards our common Lady, and the honour rendered to the image passes over to the prototype. But this is an unwritten tradition, just as is also the worshipping towards the East and the worship of the Cross, and very many other similar things.’ (On Defence of Icons: from: Medieval Sourcebook, o.c., 15–16.

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solidarity and eschatological hope beyond history and beyond human biography, be it on the pulpit, in public life or in the academy (Tracy, 1981). From its very beginning, however, theology was accompanied by apophaticism and by a fundamental dialectics of ‘sic et non’, which is the exact denition of what analogy means to be: dialectical afrmation, negation and comparison within the inescapable God-world-self complex wherein we, human persons created in the image ( Judaism, Christianity) and being khalifs (Islam) of God, are interwoven, without ever being able to identify, represent or materialize the divine (nor, for that matter, the self or the world). Likewise irony, metaphorism,8 exaggeration and surrealism were the artistic elements which accompanied Christian pictorial art, most clearly in the work of Hieronymus Bosch. It is remarkable that, at the eve of the Reformation, people like Bosch could still be aware of the apophatic character of divine reality, of paradise and hell, by imagining a surrealistic world of biblical and extra-biblical sceneries of the human habitat. People like him were perfectly aware of the analogical imagination which they depicted. Eckhart in the thirteenth century and Bosch’ contemporary Cusanus, the champions of apophatic theology in the West, developed in the East by the works of Dionysius Areopagita, provided Christianity with quite a lot of conceptual imagery and metaphors, which made people aware of the essential difference between our imagery and the true being of God. Like Bosch they used rather earthly and material images, comparable to Dionysius’ trinitarian analogy of the three lamps, mingling their light into the one illumination of the room whereby we may see and read.9 Nicholas of Kues referred to the omnipresent activity of God as to the eye of a gure on an icon or painting, which is following its observer, without leaving its unmoved position and without losing its possibility to do the same with another

8 Metaphorism comes most clearly to the fore in the attributes that identify the saints’ gures, which have no intention to express likeness or similarity to the original persons. The saints never posed before the artist! 9 Sloterdijk, 2005, 376 e.v. See: Dionysius Areopagita, De divinis nominibus II, 4.5: Etenim videmus in domo multis unitis lampadibus ad unum aliquod lumen unita omnium omnia lumina, et unam claritatem indiscretam relucentem, et non etiam quis, ut arbitror, poterit alicujus lampadis lumen ab aliis ex omnia lumina continenti aere discernere, et videre sine altera parte alteram partem, totis in totis inconfuse contemperatis. Sed si etiam unam quis ardentium subduxerit domo, coibit et proprium totum lumen, nullum quiddam aliorum luminum in semetipsa complectens, aut suimet alteris relinquens. Erat enim earum, quod quidem dixi, omnium ad omnia perfectissima unitas, incommixta universaliter, et nulla parte confusa: et haec, existente in corpore aere, et ex materiali igne pendente lumine.

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and possibly innumerable observers.10 So God invests himself in the eye of those who want to look at him: ‘God planted his eye into our hearts’, as Sirach 8, 17 has it. Paradoxically enough, in the same pre-Reformation period, through the theological constructions of the late scholastic conceptual articulation of faith, the reication of the history of salvation as an historical sequence of God’s great deeds in creation, redemption, judgment and nal recreation could take place. It has lead to a reied idea of a divine providential mechanics, a supra-natural world of realistic devils and angels and ecclesial tools of reparation for human failure and sin, exclusively assigned to the clergy and controlled by the bishop of Rome. The reason, that the aforementioned apophatic theology could not come through in the mainline spirituality and teachings of the medieval church, seems to be, that the original Semitic hesitation to identify the divine with any natural or historical phenomenon and the biblical tradition to speak about divine presence in terms of mystery and mediation (by angels, prophets, natural phenomena like lightnings or storms), gave way to a much more direct relation of God with earthly reality through a system of causality beyond causality, as it was introduced by Thomism, specied by Duns Scotus and popularised by the Mendicants. Such ‘cosmocentric’ worldview was, indeed, received from Hellenism. It had been fostered by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle

10 Nicholas of Kues, De visione Dei seu de Icona Liber, c. VIII: Domine tu vides et habes oculus. Es igitur oculus, quia habere tuum est esse. Ob hoc in te ipso omnia specularis. Nam si in me visus esset oculus sicut in te Deo meo, tunc in me omnia viderem. Cum oculus sit specularis et speculum quantumcumque parvum in se gurative recipiat montem magnum et cuncta, quae in eius montis supercie existunt. Et sic omnium species sunt in oculo speculari. Tamen, quia visus noster non videt per medium oculi specularis nisi id particulariter ad quod se convertit, quia vis eius non potest nisi particulariter determinari per obiectum, ideo non videt omnia, quae in speculo oculi capiuntur. Sed visus tuus, cum sit oculus seu speculum vivum, in se omnia videt. Immo quia causa omnium visibilium. Hinc omnia in causa et ratione omnium, hoc est in se ipso complectitur et videt. Oculus tuus Domine sine exione ad omnia pergit. Quod enim oculus noster se ad obiectum ectit, ex eo est, quod visus noster per angulum quantum videt. Angulus autem oculi tui Deus non est quantus, sed est innitus, qui est et circulus, immo et sphaera innita, quia visus [tuus] est oculus sphaericitatis et perfectionis innitae. Omnia igitur in circuitu et sursum et deorsum simul videt. O quam admirandus est visus tuus, qui est theos (Deus), omnibus ipsum perscrutantibus! Quam pulcher et amabilis est omnibus te diligentibus! Quam terribilis est omnibus, qui dereliquerunt te Domine Deus meus! Visu enim vivicas Domine omnem spiritum et laeticas omnem beatum et fugas omnem maestitiam. Respice igitur in me misericorditer et salva facta est anima mea.

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and adopted by the Jewish Wisdom Scriptures, by Philo and the early Christian writers, like Clement of Alexandria. Besides the ‘Book of Scriptures’ there is the ‘Book of Nature’ and only together they form the ‘Book of Life’, which is in the hands of God. Medieval philosophy and theology of the Scholastics continued this line of thought, by referring to the laws of nature and the moral system of virtues, derived from the Stoa, to the Eternal Law of God (lex aeterna). Inuence of the Islam and its Aristotelian philosophers may be seen as having strengthened these ideas, the Quran revealing God as the all-decisive Power, who rules the whole mechanism of nature and the will of human beings, the Quran being literally the recitation of Gods own spoken words (kalam). In this worldview God becomes both artisan and artist. Gods presence prevails over his apparent absence. From top to bottom the world system was seen as a fully articulated mechanism willed by God. The metaphor of a world machine (machina mundi) is found in the writings of a great variety of 12th and 13th century scholars. For example, Robert Grosseteste (1170–1253) asserted that, ‘The world machine most evidently speaks of the eternal art by which it has been made. . . .’ In his work on The Sphere, Grosseteste used this metaphor three times in the rst thirteen lines of his treatise.11 Similarly the metaphor of the world machine is found in the writings of Alan of Lille, Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard Sylvester, Sacrobosco and no doubt others. For them, as for Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), there were two ‘books of nature’: a visible and an invisible one. The visible world, i.e. the world of the senses, was to be seen as the sign and the image, the icon of the world of God.12 Medieval art, especially the art of glass painting and the stained windows of the

11 R. Grosseteste, De Sphaera, cap. 1: Intentio nostra in hoc tractatu est describere guram machinae mundanae et centrum [et situm] et guras corporum eam constituentium et motus corporum superiorum et guras circulorum suorum. Quia igitur huius mundi machina sphaerica est, dicendum est in primis quid sit sphaera?—Est autem sphaera transitus semicirculi diametro eius xa, quousque ad locum suum, unde incepit, redeat. 1)—Sit igitur semicirculus A B C; circumvolvatur super A B diametrum xam: manifestum est, quod motu suo describit corpus, a cuius medio scil. 0 omnes lineae exeuntes ad eius circumferentiam sunt aequales et erit corpus illud cuiusmodi corpus dicimus esse sphaeram.—Tale autem corpus est tota mundi machina. (translated from: Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, Münster i.W.: Aschendorff, 1912, 11). 12 See Otten, 2004, 47ff. An illustrative example is Alan de Lille’s poem De miseria mundi. The rst verse reads: ‘Omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum, nostrae vitae, nostrae sortis, nostri status, nostrae mortis, dele signaculum (The whole created world, like a book and a picture, serves us as a mirror of our life, our fate, our state, our death, a trustworthy seal) (quoted in Otten, o.c., 80).

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Gothic cathedrals became itself something like the epiphany of God in nature13 and the icon-painting techniques became almost sacramental: the wood, the paints, the oil, the eggs used to get natural colours and the wax to protect them were considered to be ‘gifts of creation’ transgured by the representation of the holy, i.e. the faces of Christ, Mary, the saints of the Church or the scenario’s depicting the biblical stories. It must have been this direct identication of the divine, which gave rise to the late Medieval and Reformation protests in the West against the doctrine of transubstantiation and real presence (Abaelard, Berengar, Hus, Calvin), against the ecclesiastical indulgence-system (Luther), against the canonisation and veneration of saints and their coming out of the church in public processions (Calvin). Back to Basics: the Reformation Even if we are aware of its character of barbaric revolts and classstruggles against elitist exhibitionism of powerful economic and political nobility and clergy (Dupeux, Jezler, Wirth, 2000), the historical iconoclasms of the 8th, 12th and 16th centuries in Christianity or those of original Buddhism and Islam could still rightly be interpreted as popular movements against idolatry, opposing the fetish-character of material images of the divine, thus implying a ‘negative theology in action’. As the prohibition of images of the Jewish Law opposed Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hellenistic idolatry, so did the Early church campaign against the cult of idols and their sanctuaries all over the oikoumenè of its times, including the imperial cult and rites. The iconoclastic movements of the 8th century CE in Byzance, from a phenomenological point of view, might be seen as running parallel to similar revolts like those of Theravada Buddhism, opposing the veneration of the Buddha and of the local gods in India and Sri Lanka or those of Islam, opposing any material representation of ever greater Allah and of the prophet Muhammed and destroying all polytheistic idols and images. The Medieval reform movements of the so called Pastoreaux, of the Humiliates, of the Cistercians, of the Cathars, propagating the return

13 William Durandus of Mende: ‘The stained glass windows in the church are holy scriptures that exclude wind and rain, that is all evil things, but they transmit the light of the true sun, that is God, into the hearts of the faithful’ (Rationale divinorum ofciorum, liber I, Turnhout, Brepols 1995 (CCCM 140).

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to the poverty of apostolic life and purity of mind, were critical about the use of images and partly came to iconoclastic actions against the abundance and wealth of the established church and its cult of the saints.14 According to Euan Cameron, the iconoclasms of the Reformation, besides pleading for a return to the purity of the Jewish Law and the simple life-style of the Early Church, certainly show traces of a popular, when not barbaric revolt of the lower classes against the wealth and privileges of the clergy and against the medieval economy of the chapters and guilds (Cf. Cameron, 1991, 249–252). The Reformation iconoclasms meant the break-down of the system of ecclesiastical mediation of divine grace as such: not only images of the saints, considered to be instruments of intercession, healing and prosperity in popular usage, but complete altars, relic shrines, liturgical utensils and whole monasteries were destroyed, stolen or sold to the benet of the poor. Likewise the sceneries of the liturgy and the sacraments were stripped off from their theatrical character as representations of salvation history. Theatre itself became a sinful performance of imagination within Calvinism. The Reformation iconoclasms, though different in nature in the various parts of Europe where they occurred, meant a cleansing of the churches rather than a protest against religious imagery as such. The Judeo-Christian understanding of revelation, the Reformers claimed, i.e. the epiphany of God in nature and history, has been characterized by the concept of the Word of God and its faith as a des ex auditu. It is the breath of God which gives life to the living and it is the voice of God which is heard by Adam and Eve, by Noah, by Abraham, by Isaac, by Moses and all the prophets of Israel, and naly by and through Jesus (cf. Hebr. 1, 1–2). And all of them nd their faith in obedience and responsibility, by audire and respondere: Omnis recta cognitio Dei ab oboedientia nascitur wrote John Calvin in the rst part of his Institutes I, 6, 2. But even there, in listening to the Word of God, we do not hear the viva vox evangelii in direct speech, but only indirectly, through the interpretation of the preacher, the catechist, the exegetes, and within an hermeneutic community, the church, the guardian of the

14 Müller, 1989, 21–30; Loewenich, 1980, 540–546 (544–545), referring mainly to H. Grundmann, Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters, 2nd ed., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1967. Von Loewenich quotes e.g. Bernard of Clairvaux condemning curiosas depictiones, quae, dum orantium in se retorquent aspectum, impediunt et affectum . . . Currunt homines ad osculandum, invitantur ad donandum; et magis mirantur pulchra quam venerantur sacra . . . Fulget ecclesia in parietibus et in pauperibus eget (PL 182, 194–195) (ib., 545).

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divine commandments. The grace of God cannot be reied in visible elements like the sacraments, the clergy or the liturgy, nor in sacred places, sanctuaries or temples. The Reformers, thus, pointed to a central dogma of all monotheistic believers, who would agree, that our relation towards God is not of the order of the senses. God cannot be seen, smelt, heard, tasted or touched otherwise than metaphorically, although the order of hearing seems to be an exception: God communicates through human language, be it even there only indirectly through human speech and writing, testimony and narrative. According to Gerhard Ebeling such communication is the most Spirit-like, i.e. breath-like, material and immaterial alike, nite as the sound of a word may be and innite at the same time, because its meaning extends to and reverberates in its hearers through all times and over all places (Ebeling, 1966). God, therefore, can be absent and present in language at the same time, whereas the other senses would reify and objectify the presence of God in a much more direct and empirical, even erotic relation, which would make God or the gods part of our earthly reality. Only in visions and dreams may God come before our eyes and even then only in form of light and radiation, in a cloud or re, or in the shape of an angel, or, as in the gure of Jesus Christ, in a man being ‘the icon of the invisible God’, never, and I would say, not even in the case of Jesus’ disciples, not even at mount Tabor (Mt. 17, 1–13), from face to face: to see God would mean to die! (Ex. 33.20). It is allowed to Moses to speak with God in a personal way (Ex. 33, 11), but not to see God from face to face, he must hide himself and cover up his face, he may only see God from behind (Ex. 33, 23): God always having been earlier there, than where and when we think He was. The disciples on Mount Tabor are bound to wake up from their dreams and visions, like Jacob in the desert (Gen. 28) and to descend from the mountain and go back to daily life with all its thorns and stones, its challenges and sorrows: the garden of Eden is for ever closed to humans, no places of beatitude to permanently dwell in, no promised land nor holy ground to possess for ever, but diaspora, suffering, despair, persecution, failure, sin, mourning and death mixed up with more comforting experiences of community, joy, hope, love, virtue, desire and birth, the mixed blessings of life with all its dialectical data and emotions we call culture and society. Precisely in this dialectics of hope and fear we have developed, by our hermeneutical skills, the art to orient ourselves in life through language and other symbols of communication, out of which our Holy Scriptures

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or Sacred Texts of Tradition have been selected as divinely inspired guides for our lives.15 Secularisation In modern and post-modern times, we are, once more, witnesses to an epistemological revolt against the referential character of religious imagination as such, called secularisation. Secularisation has reduced every form of religious imagination to a function of human need and desire or even to the result of certain either healthy (aestheticism) or pathological (psychological reductionism, regression theories) neurological states of mind. The iconoclasms of the French revolution and of the Napoleontic era and those of some Russian Tsars have lead to the destruction of monasteries, the expulsion of monks and the dissolution of religious orders as well as to public riots and demolitions of clerical property. Not only religious images, but religious beliefs as such had to disappear in a long process of de-mythologisation, ending up with the proclamation of the ‘death of God’ by Nietzsche. The European process of secularisation, thus, might be interpreted as a further radicalisation of the Reformers iconoclastic Puritanism (Chadwick, 1975). Philosophers, politicians and the new social scientists of the 18th and 19th century declared the autonomy of the world as being fully ‘saeculum’, i.e. secular and stressed the projection-character of any representation of God and the sacred: all images of God, be they material or mental, are just the echo, the mirroring or the reection of human needs or desires, dreams and frustrations. Religion as such is interpreted as a function of the humane, as a product of imagination without any other meaning or referent than the human self in its desire for salvation from fear and anxiety, or, positively, in its search for identity, survival and dreamed immortality. Nietzsche’s proclamation ‘God is dead’ wiped out all horizons of the world, disabling any transcendent ‘beyond’ and implied the rejection of any ‘meta-physical’ reality. Imagination and interpretation became the basic skills of philosophy. Theology, gradually, fell victim to a similar trend and ied into historicism, the comparative and descriptive study of religion and into pan-metaphorism. 15 See: A Treasure in Earthen Vessels. An instrument for an ecumenical reection on hermeneutics (Faith and Order Paper No. 182), Geneva, World Council of Churches 1998.

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Secularisation, however, was not the last form of iconoclasm. The development of the neuro-sciences and of neuro-psychology has resulted in a form of neuro-philosophy, which breaks down any idea of autonomy of the self into a eld of neural networks in interaction of our bodies with their environment. Images, concepts, thoughts and actions themselves and even consciousness and the idea of the self are the result of neural plasticity and of learning processes within synaptic chemistry which starts at the beginning of embryonic life and ends with death and burial. The living human self is an epiphenomenon of biological processes in permanent interaction with culture. No more soul or subject or a substantive person, who could be the bearer of a divine calling or the hearer of a divine word: religious attitudes and forms of expression are just the result of nurture and culture, of learning processes in interpretative and imagination-bound communities. Religion is an epiphenomenon, not of human dreams and desires alone, but of the self-organisation of our cell-mechanism, and of the experience of its limits and aporia’s. We are aware of our vulnerability, our fragility, contingency and mortality. We are confronted with the unsurpassable alterity of the other, especially of the other’s body and its intentionality and most impressively of the alterity of the other’s birth and dying, of which the awareness of our own unknowable birth and coming death are derived. The dialectics of presence and absence has dominated both philosophy and theology in the 20th century. Since Friedrich Nietzsche laid bare the force of appearance in aesthetics and ethics, reality and truth have been de-constructed into the result of imagination, symbolic interaction or metaphor and intertextuality (Broich, Pster, 1985; Valdès, Miller, 1989). History and time have been unmasked as story and discourse. Even the story-teller him or herself has been deconstructed in a serious attempt at subjecticide, initiated by Bataille and Foucault, just in time prevented by the reference to the subject of the other who saves my identity or rather ‘mon ipséité’ through his or her appeal to my potentiality to act on his or her behalf. It is my acting out, coming out and being there as Kosinky’s novel Being There (Berkeley: Grove Press 1999 (1st ed. 1970) has it, upon the request of the other, which makes my presence real. Only in dialogue and conversation, in difference and exchange ‘I’ come into existence (P. Ricoeur, 1990)). Post-modern hermeneutics have deconstructed this whole idea of a text being ever able to function as an unequivocal reference to what happens in life or what would be the will of the gods. Its intertextual

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dependence, its polysemic character, its ideological overtones and possible manipulation make a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ necessary, which starts with textual criticism, contextual reading, structuralist reader-response analysis, and ends up with an enhanced idea of demythologisation or mythologism, in the case of religious texts claiming the pan-metaphorism and non-referential character of any God-talk.16 An analogous phenomenon do we encounter in the world of signs and symbols and in language itself, through which our imagination is at work, even in the perception of the appeal of the other or in the appearance of differences and alterity with whom I am confronted. The sign has its deictic function17—bringing me into another state of mind or in another world far beyond its indexical, literal meaning: the sign of a cross, though polyvalent and ambiguous, gets its deictic meaning only in context: it means different things referring to a crossing of streets as a warning sign in trafc or as the negation or crossing out of a concept, like in Marion’s crossing out of the word ‘God’ in Dieu sans l’être, not to speak of the many crosses that have been designed in the history of Christian art and gestures. The sign as such contains an original index, referring to a spatial opposition or movement between up and down and from right to left, but the deictical meaning has its origin in the real crosses of human life, in dangerous clashes between people coming from different directions, in crucixions eliminating people for the sake of the security of the ruling classes, or in the many negations of concepts or reports we have to cross out in our ongoing hermeneutic interpretations of reality we have labelled as truth. Towards an Iconic Hermeneutics After the collapse of its conceptual systems of thought, based on the logic of either causality—God as energetic Prima Causa and Causa Sui—or of anthropomorphic relations—God as a partner in nature and history, as a loving Father taking care of his children and as the ultimate Judge of human behaviour—, theology might be helped to rediscover and ground anew its referential character and its legitimate

16

For a critical approach to this hermeneutical tendency, see: Schori, 1995. On the concept of such ‘deictic function’ of language and signs, see: F. Lenz, 2003. 17

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place ‘im Bereich des Denkens’ by developing an iconic hermeneutics of monotheistic religious traditions. Such hermeneutics of the icon18 differs from aesthetics in that it does not look at the icon with an aesthetic gaze, or interpreting it in a representational mode, looking for the indexical meaning of the image, but concentrating on its ‘deictic’ function: the icon (either as ‘logo’ (Naomi Klein) or as ‘scenery’) demands me something to do, invites me to a certain state of mind, to participate in its scenery. Religious icons invite their spectators to be taken up in the life-goals and the divine communion of Christ or the saints portrayed. Though, similarly, textual hermeneutics aim at the art of understanding of the meaning of texts for their application in life (Dilthey, Gadamer) and have a fundamental therapeutic or soteriological intention as well in searching the archè and telos of the reader (P. Ricoeur), iconic hermeneutics differ from those by way of a much more direct appeal to body and mind of the spectator. The hermeneutical function at work here makes real participation in the life of the divine referent of the icon or the liturgy possible and, as any other hermeneutical process, implies the transformation or re-guration (Ricoeur) of the participants. It is not our ‘aesthetic gaze’ that liturgy and icons want to evoke, nor artistic emotional pleasure or personal satisfaction, but a real ‘change of heart’, conversion or metanoia. Not the beauty of the liturgical performance as such or the artistic aspect of the icon, nor its function on behalf of our human needs and wants (its miraculous operation, so much abhorred in Early Byzantine Orthodoxy) is the most important object of study to deal with in an iconic hermeneutics, but their referential function in the mediation of the divine, in a dialectics of presence and absence we might call sacramental (Chauvet, 1988). In this sense, the reading and viewing of the biblia pauperum and of religious art in general is not different from and in fact indissolubly connected to the interpretation of stories and texts from the Bible: accedit verbum ad elementum ac t sacramentum (Augustine). I would suggest, therefore, that word and sacrament belong together in the Christian commemoration of the days of creation and redemption and the expectation of their nal fullment on the Last Day. Our tradition

18 This expression stems from J.-L. Marion, 1982, 36: ‘Herméneutique de l’icône voulait dire: le visible ne devient la visibilité de l’invisible que s’il en reçoit l’intention, bref s’il renvoie, quant à l’intention, à l’invisible.’

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of memoria and exspectatio combines the hearing of the Word and the vision of Hope, passing by through our senses of hearing and looking forward towards a God who is there in passing by. It is the icon of Jesus’ Pascha, passing by in our history through his life, death and resurrection, which is the most important icon for an iconic hermeneutics of the Christian faith. Marion speaks about God beyond being, because no ontological category whatsoever does apply to God and because any onto-theology, that makes God part of our metaphysical worldviews, is essentially idolatric (Marion, 1982, 35–37; 73–75 ; 91ff.). God precedes all being. God opens whatever is into new possibilities of being. Saying that ‘God is’ immobilizes God within the processes of being. Just as the statue is a gure in time and space, which xates the movement of a man or a horse into this one moment and this one place and makes it unmoved into just an object to be gazed at and to go around, so God would become just ‘something’ or for that matter ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’in the universe. To revere such ‘something’ or ‘someone’, such a part or even the universe of being itself, would be an idolatric act. With the icon, a two dimensional painting of a portrait of a saint or a biblical scenery, it is different: the icon reveals and covers the mystery of its meaning at the same time. It tells us the story of the life of a saint, of Abraham and his three guests or of Jesus with Moses, Elijah and the three disciples, as a parable of what God does with human people and of what God asks from us. The gaze of the gures painted is directed at us, the gestures are such, that they invite us to the world of God and the sphere of the holy beyond the icon, towards a higher level, a higher and transgured quality of being. The icon directs our gaze beyond the picture, the iconostasis brings our mind behind the screens, it attracts us to the holy of holy, to the heavenly sphere of the divine. It is a permanent performative, transforming and transguring symbol and that is precisely what its ‘deictic’ function means. The distance between the three-dimensional idol and the two-dimensional icon becomes even more striking, when we make abstraction from the material object we call ‘icon’ and use the term ‘icon’ in a metaphorical sense, as when Paul called Jesus ‘the icon of the invisible God.’ (2 Cor. 4, 4; Col. 1, 15). Even in Jesus God does not ‘come out’: Jesus invites those whom he encounters to enter with him into contact with the world of God. What the icon does, its transguring power, is valid for the sacramental signs as well, both in the Eastern and in the Western theological traditions: they effect what they mean by their signs and rites, but the signs and rites, the material elements of water, bread and wine,

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oil or the imposition of hands are only accidental to what they perform: its partakers are really and effectively sharing in the grace and presence of God, through the elements, words and rites of the sacramental celebration, but God is not incarnated, condensed or substantiated in the water of baptism, the oil of the anointing, the bread and wine of the eucharist or in the hands op the bishop who consecrates. Precisely this fundamental difference with all other forms of material conversion is, what the medieval concept of ‘transubstantiation’ tried to express (Cf. Purcell, 2001, 135–151; Slenczka, 1993). Bread and wine are the elements that, together with the story of Jesus’ Last Supper, of his passion, crucixion and resurrection, effectuate the real connection of the communicants with God through the presence of the Risen Christ among his people, in the power of God’s Holy Spirit. They function like the icons, as an intermediary of our encounter with God. A similar phenomenon we might observe for the use of some concepts like the innite or the eternal, the self or the future. They cannot be circumscribed or dened, grasped or reied. They are fundamentally open for ever new realisations, ever new intentions. Unlike the idea of God as Prima Causa and Causa Sui, making God into the metaphysical cornerstone of our world-system and the guarantor of epistemological certainty, the analogy of God-thought with the dynamic concept of innity does not xate God somewhere in time and space or in the chains of causality and instrumental rationality. Likewise iconic thinking means a movement, a passage of our mind, away from the material picture and beyond its scenery into a ‘world’ which is beyond our grasp, into which we ourselves are taken up with everything we are: the world of hope, fullment, joy and perfection, of what the Scriptures call the Reign of God. The idea of God itself, congured in many ways within the religions of humankind, functions as an icon. It recongures our mind, creating distance and presence at the same time, transcending the rules of causality and instrumentality, functioning in a ‘deictic’, non-indexal way (Lambek, 2002; van Peursen, 1992), without becoming non-referential or only being the phantom-like feedback of our needs and desires. It transgures our thought and our human position in a unique way. The idea, the image or the name of God are not identical to God. The name of God, or rather the invocation ‘God!?’ brings us in a relation with God, tunes us in with the will of God. What happens in prayer may be compared with the event of love between lovers: their bodies, their romantic feelings, their kisses, their lust and intercourse are not their love, but refer to and enact their love, bring them further on the way of their love. Likewise

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invocating God means to enact the love between creatures and their Creator, God self rewarding such enactment by blessing us with joy and peace and calling us to care for one another and to work for justice and the integrity of creation. In calling upon modern French phenomenological thinking about the ‘saturated phenomenon’, the ‘gift-character’ of being and the so called ‘liminal’ experiences in life (alterity, sexual difference, the self, birth and death), the dialectics of the icon might provide a new vocabulary for a foundational theology that is ‘beyond imagination’ by being at the same time apophatic and referential to the real presences of the divine in human life. The analogy of the icon resembles that of prayer! Modern French phenomenologists (Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Michael de Certeau) and postmodern philosophers (Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard) offer new ways of representing the idea of the divine and of religion, which do not compete with either (natural) sciences or the humanities, but, instead, imply a much richer form of knowledge or ‘epistèmè’ which goes beyond sheer empirism and the pan-metaphorism of pure esthetic imagination (cf. Jonkers, Welten, 2005). In and through the gift of sense-perception, which precedes all intentionality and interpretation, in the aesthetic encounter of the self with the saturated phenomenon of life, we become aware of the givenness of what we hear, see, taste, smell and touch, discovering ourselves as the beneciaries and favourites (adonné(e)s) of a gratuitous gift of life, of consciousness and conscience. Jean-Luc Marion warns us however, that this insight of gratuitousness of the gift, may not lead to the reifying of the gift, as if we could dispose of it, use it, construct, destruct and reconstruct it as if it were ours. The givenness of reality presupposes an invisible giver, who realizes himself in the act of giving without ever materializing this gift in the form of special objects or things divine. It is only given in passing by. We cannot localize the divine in midst of reality, or its must be on the costs of idolatry. We may only encounter the divine in form of icons, not of idols. All our representations of the divine, be they material or mental, are just icons of it, transparent images, which invite us beyond our gaze, to look through, to transcend the picture of their portraits or the actions of their scenery beyond the icon and to let oneself be lead to the world of the holy and the life of the saints behind or rather beyond the image. We cannot venerate the material stuff of the icons themselves without falling into idolatry. It would not mean veneration

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at all if we would kiss the portrait of a saint without being touched by his or her life, nor would we really venerate the saint if we would magically touch the oil of the painting, the wood of the icon-body or the frame of its silver just to superstitiously share in its supernatural forces. We cannot even share in the sacraments of baptism or the eucharist, without being aware, that it is not the water which puries our soul, but the Holy Spirit who comes down on our life and that it is not the physical bread and the physical wine which feed us for eternal life, but the Body and Blood of Jesus, who went to the Father as our heavenly Advocate to guide us through life towards life eternal. But precisely this Bread and Blood are not detectable for our eyes or objects for DNA research. They are sacramentally present, absent and present at the same time (Chauvet). Similarly we cannot understand the biblical stories or the sermon on the pulpit, if we are not led by the Spirit of God to understand what was written there’ (cf. Acts 8, Philip and the eunuch or Lk. 24: the Disciples at Emmaus). Conclusion We cannot meet God in the physical world, but according to Gen. 18 we might encounter divine presence in sharing our homes, meals and drinks and commodities, with unexpected foreigners, or in caring for the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoners of persecution and asylum seekers, the poor, the sick and the socially and physically deprived because they are made, like us, to the image and likeness of God. According to Mt. 25 we meet in them the face of Jesus Christ. It are those who have lived such open hospitality and relief for others as living icons of the divine love, whom we venerate as saints and exhibit their remembrance in icons of all sorts. Not the demolition of their statues and images was the fundamental mistake of the iconoclasts, but the idea that they could do away with the ideal of virtue and perfection embodied in their remembrance, the commemoration of their merits through their faith, their works and witness in their Vitae and the celebration on the feasts of their birthdays into heaven. In this sense the modern toppling of the idols of power and false ideologies is of a quite different nature from that of historical religious iconoclasms and a much more plausible recognition of divine sovereignty than the barbaric breaking of religious images in the past ever was. The pulling down of all unjust power gures is itself an icon of the hidden presence of God

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opting, condescending to the poor and powerless, crying it out loudly: there is no violence in God. Precisely that is what the dialectics of the icon have to say to us: those who died and passed away—the patriarchs and prophets of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth and his rst disciples and apostles, all the martyrs and confessors of the Christian church in their iconic galleries and iconostases, all the prophets and holy teachers of Islam, commemorated in hadith—build together a communion of the Holy, gathered around the True Holy, wherein we share through our prayers and hymns, our kisses of peace and reconciliation, bowing down in adoration and proskunèsis ve times a day, cleansing our hands and putting off our shoes, swearing off all aggression and violence in our hearts, as the Quran asks true believers to do. The real iconoclash is about the concerns and the references of our prayer-life. The clash of religions as part of the clash of civilisations cannot be overcome by stressing tolerance and freedom of religion and convictions alone, but only by joining hands and hearts in common adoration and intercession before a merciful, sovereign and non-violent God of whom the peacemakers and well-doers of human history are the real icons set before us as our guides into life everlasting. The galleries of their painted icons and carved images constitue a biblia pauperum, not because they were meant for the uneducated who could not read, but because their portraits and sceneries point to the very poverty and humility that are needed to understand any religion or confession in view of the richness and superabundance of God, present and absent in a mysterious love for humanity, JHWH-Adonai, Abba, Allah. LITERATURE Primary Literature Dionysius Areopagita, De divinis nominibus II, 4.5. John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, I, 6, 2. Nicholas of Kues, De visione Dei seu de Icona Liber, c. VIII. Robert Grosseteste, De Sphaera, cap. 1. William Durandus of Mende, Rationale divinorum ofciorum, liber I, Trurnhout: Brepols, 1995 (CCCM 140). Secundary literature A Treasure in Earthen Vessels. An instrument for an ecumenical reection on hermeneutics (Faith and Order Paper No. 182), Geneva, World Council of Churches 1998. Avery-Peck, A.J., ‘Idolatry in Judaism’, in: The Encyclopedia of Judaism, Vol. I, Leiden: Brill, 2000, 434–443.

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Broich, U., Pster, M., (ed.), Intertextualität, Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985. Cameron, E., The European Reformation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 249–252. Chadwick, O., The secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Chauvet, J.-M., Symbole et Sacrement. Une relecture sacramentelle de l’existence chrétienne, Paris: Cerf, 1988. Denzinger, H., Schönmetzer, H., Enchiridion Symbolorum etc., Freiburg: Herder 1965, 600–603. Draisma S., (ed.), Intertextuality in Biblical Writings. Essays in honour of Bas van Iersel, Kampen: Kok, 1989. Dupeux, C., Jezler, P., Wirth, J., Bildersturm: Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille?, München: Fink, 2000. Ebeling, G., Theology and Proclamation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966. Glassé, C., The Concise Encylopaedia of Islam, revised edition, London: Stacey, 2001, 212–213. Halsall, P., (ed.), Medieval Sourcebook, London: Thomas Baker, 1898, 10–17. Hartmann, W., ‘Das Konzil von Frankfurt 794 und Nizäa 787’, in Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 20 (1988) 307–324. Jonkers, P., Welten, R., (eds.), God in France. Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God, Louvain: Peeters, 2005. Khoury, A.-Th., ‘Apologétique Byzantine contre l’Islam (VIIIe–XIIIe siècles)’, in ProcheOrient Chrétien 29 (1979) 242–300; 30 (1980) 132–174; 32 (1982) 14–49. Klein, N., No logo: no space, no choice, no jobs: taking aim at the brand bullies, New York: Picador, 1999. Kosinsky, J., Being There, Berkeley: Grove Press 1999 [1st ed. 1970]. Lambek, M., (ed.), A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, Blackwell, Malden, Ma etc 2002. Lenz F., (ed.), Deictic conceptualisation of space, time and person, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003. Loewenich, W. von, s.v. ‘Bilder’, V/2 (im Westen) in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 6, Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1980, 540–546 (544–545). Maeseneer, Y. de, ‘Saint Francois versus McDonald’s? Contemporary Globalization Critique and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aestethetics’, in The Heythrop Journal 44 (2003), 1–14. Marini, P., ‘Iconography and Liturgy’, in: vatican.va/news services/liturgy/2005/ documents/ns lit doc 20050120. Marion, J.-L., Dieu sans l’être, Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. ———, L’idole et la distance, Paris: Grasset, 1977. Müller, D., s.v. ‘Katharer’, in : Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 18, Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1989, 21–30. Naef, S., Y a-t-il une ‘question de l’image’ en Islam? Paris: Tétraèdre 2004. Nikolaou, Th., ‘Die Ikonenverehrung als Beispiel ostkirchlicher Theologie und Frömmigkeit nach Johannes Damaskus’, in Ostkirchliche Studien 25 (1976) 138–165. Otten, W., From Paradise to paradigm. A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2004, 47 ff. Peursen, C. van, Verhaal en werkelijkheid: een deiktische ontologie, Kampen: Kok Agora, 1992. Purcell, M., ‘‘This is My Body’ Which Is ‘For You’ . . . Ethically Speaking’, in: L. Boeve, J.Ries (ed.), The Presence of Transcendence, Leuven: Peeters, 2001, 135–151. Schori, K., Das Problem der Tradition, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1995. Slenczka, N., Realpräsenz und Ontologie: Untersuchung der ontologischen Grundlagen der Transsignikationslehren, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993. Sloterdijk, P., Sferen, Amsterdam: Boom, 2005.

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Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE ), Vol. 6, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980, 525f. Thümmel, H.-G., ‘Die fränkische Reaktion auf das 2. Nicaenum 787 in den “Libri Carolini’’, in: R. Berndt (ed.), Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. Kristallisationspunkt karolingischer Kultur, Mainz, 1997, 965–980 (Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte vol. 80; Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, Vol. 2). Tracy, D., The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, London: SCM, 1981. Valdès M.J., Miller, O., Identity of the Literary Text, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

3. WORD AND IMAGE IN CHRISTIAN RITUALS G. Rouwhorst (University of Tilburg) Introduction Like all other rituals, Christian liturgical celebrations are multimedia events. In addition to verbal elements such as readings from the Bible, prayers, formulas and sermons, they also contain important non-verbal elements. The character of these celebrations is greatly affected by the liturgical environment (including architecture), text delivery (use of the voice, intonation, chanting), musical instruments, vestments, ritual gestures, and the body language of those performing the ritual. All these verbal and non-verbal elements of Christian ritual have the capacity to evoke meanings and associations among those participating. Although the combination of verbal and non-verbal elements has been an important feature of Christian rituals and Christian communities throughout the history of the Church, the balance between the two has varied considerably. More specically, this concerns the balance between verbal and visual aspects, between ‘words’ and ‘images’. In some periods, liturgy has been strongly word-oriented. This was certainly the case in the Early Church, which inherited a focus on the reading and elucidation of the Bible from the Jewish tradition. This verbal dimension has also been particularly strong in the churches of the Reformation, especially in their Zwinglian and Calvinist variants (Van Asselt, 2007). In Roman Catholic liturgy the balance between verbal and non-verbal elements has clearly shifted in favour of the former since the Second Vatican Council approved the use of the vernacular language. In Byzantine liturgy, however, the visual dimension became increasingly signicant from the early Middle Ages or before. After the victory over the Iconoclasts, church buildings were lled with icons and frescoes; selected according to more or less canonical patterns, they strongly inuenced the way in which the faithful experienced the liturgy in general and the Eucharist in particular (cf. f.i. Schulz, 1992, 67–77). This is borne out by numerous liturgical commentaries from

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the Byzantine tradition,1 including an inuential tract attributed to the eight-century writer Germanus of Constantinople (Bornert, 1966, 125–180; Meyendorff, 1999, 52–54), and another by the fourteenthcentury writer Nicolas Cabasilas (Cabasilas, 1967; Hussey, McNulty, 1960; Bornert, 1966, 215–244). A comparable development took place in the western Church in the early Middle Ages. Although religious imagery did not acquire the status of its Byzantine counterpart, nonverbal and especially visual elements became increasingly signicant in liturgical rituals (Cf. f.i. Klauser, 1969, 81–83). Naturally, this development was stimulated by the fact that most of the faithful could not understand the Latin texts. In my view, the relationship between verbal and non-verbal—particularly visual—aspects of liturgy does not receive the attention it deserves in many publications on the history of Christian liturgy. In so far as writers discuss these development at all, they rarely go beyond the descriptive level, simply mentioning the increase or decrease of visual or verbal elements and giving a few examples. Some authors hardly conceal their approval or disapproval of the developments concerned, lamenting, for instance, the supposedly disproportionate emphasis on ‘outward’ (visual) ceremonies ( Jungmann, 19523, 101–102, 143; Hope, 1978, 220–240, esp. 234),2 or the verbose, rational or didactic character of certain word-focused services.3 One usually fails to nd sufcient theoretical reection on the differences between various forms of verbal and non-verbal communication, and the manner in which these means function in ritual contexts. Why, for instance, did the emphasis shift from the verbal to the non-verbal in any particular period, or from the

1 Edition of the Greek text: Borgia, 1912. The text of Borgia’s edition has been reproduced and translated into English by Meyendorff, 1999. 2 Jungmann points to the increase of ‘dramatic’ elements in the Mass ritual of the Frankish empire, and the Mass in the Gothic era. Hope characterises the Gallican liturgies with terms that are hardly neutral, such as ‘exuberance and prolixity’, and ‘tendency towards greater ceremonial and splendour’. 3 Whereas the emphasis on the reading and explanation of the Bible—and the consequent focus on verbal elements—in the Reformation of the sixteenth century is valued in a positive way by many liturgical historians, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, it has been criticised by A. Kavanagh, 1992, and others. The supposedly didactic and rationalist character of the liturgical reform of Roman Catholic liturgy during and after the Second Vatican Council—and indirectly of Protestant liturgies—has been severely criticised by the German psychiatrist and sociologist Alfred Lorenzer (Lorenzer, 1984).

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visual to the verbal? And what effect did this have on liturgical rituals and their reception by the various categories of participants? This lack of theoretical reection and insight is largely due, I believe, to the mono-disciplinary character of most studies on the history of liturgy. Until recently, liturgical historians were usually unfamiliar with non-historical disciplines, such as social and cultural anthropology and the so-called ‘ritual studies’, which many years ago turned their attention to ritual. Neither were they acquainted with theories derived from disciplines such as linguistics and semiotics, dealing with the characteristics and function of verbal and non-verbal communication. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between verbal and visual elements in Christian liturgical rituals, and of the changes that this relationship has undergone in the past. One of my main concerns is the complex relationship between various signs and symbols, both verbal and non-verbal, particularly words and (visual) images. In this rst part, I shall draw largely on non-historical disciplines, such as cultural and social anthropology, philosophy of language and semiotics. Several seminal studies on the meaning and function of ritual have been my guide in a eld which at times is something of a labyrinth. Apart from publications mentioned in the footnotes, I would like to mention Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge 1999), Gerard Lukken’s Rituals in Abundance ( Louvain 2005) and Catherine Bell’s Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions (New York/Oxford 1997), an outstanding introduction into the study of rituals. I owe much to these inspiring works, although I must confess that I have used them in a somewhat eclectic manner. In the second part of this paper I shall attempt to apply this point of departure to a crucial period in the history of western liturgy, that of the early Middle Ages, particularly the Merovingian and Carolingian era. It was in this period that the liturgical traditions of the city of Rome were introduced in northwestern Europe, a process which entailed an increasing emphasis on the non-verbal, and especially on the visual dimensions of liturgical celebrations. A variegated spectrum of signs and symbols In attempting to gain an accurate understanding of the role played by words and images in the context of rituals, we must bear in mind that both terms, useful though they may be in everyday language, are highly

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problematic for the scholar. It would be a mistake to assume that each of these well-demarcated categories possesses its own specic features. As stated in the introduction of this volume, images can be transmitted by words, and human language is unthinkable without imagery. Moreover, one can differentiate between various types of images and different sorts of words. A distinction must therefore be made between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery, such as painting and sculpture, and, in a verbal context, between literary genres including poetry, novels and scholarly essays. In order to gain a more realistic picture of the complex relationship between words and images, both need to be placed above a common denominator, namely that of signs or symbols (leaving aside for the moment any distinction between these terms). A highly variegated spectrum will result, comprising all sorts of signs that can be transmitted by many forms of expression and communication: spoken or written language, body language (gestures, pose, movements of the eyes), art, music, architecture and so on. All these signs and symbols can be subdivided on the basis of certain qualities that they may or may not have in common; subsequently we can examine the implications of the presence or absence of specic properties for the manner in which signs ‘work’ in human communication. The following qualities of signs and symbols may be distinguished: (1) The rst criterion for signs is the sensory quality, i.e. the degree to which signs directly speak to and affect the senses, in particular the eye. This property is especially characteristic of non-verbal forms of communication such as visual representation. But it is not limited to these, since—to a varying degree—verbal communication also has a sensory dimension. This dimension is vital to poetry, narrative literature and everyday conversation. But it is much less prominent in scientic language, which tends to employ ‘abstract’ theoretical concepts and denitions, appealing to the intellect rather than the imagination. Several scholars have drawn attention to this sensory dimension. According to Suzanne Langer, the strength of non-verbal forms of communication, especially pictures, lies in their ability to speak to the senses and therefore create a more powerful impression than words. She calls this the ‘presentational character’ of non-verbal communication. Verbal language employs discursive symbols—words—which tend to break up a particular object or reality into separate elements. Visual means, on the other hand, may give a direct, integral and simultaneous presentation of the same, and therefore create a stronger impression.

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A single image, picture or photograph can evoke in an instant what a lecture may hardly achieve in an hour (Langer, 1979, 79–102; Lukken, 2005, 28–34. On liturgical celebrations, see esp.: Jetter, 1986, 163–168). Langer has made an important point here, despite the fact that her distinction between language in general and non-verbal, visual forms of expression is too rigid, failing to take the strong sensory character of many forms of written and spoken language sufciently into account. The importance of the sensory dimension has been underlined by many other scholars involved in the study of rituals. The anthropologist Victor Turner has argued that dominant ritual symbols, i.e. symbols which refer to central and axiomatic values, are characterised by two poles, one of which is ideological and normative and the other sensory. The former refers to the moral and social orders of society and to values and norms, the latter to concrete natural and physiological phenomena that may be expected to arouse desires and feelings. Turner argues that the sensory phenomena are in two respects ‘gross’: they do not take account of detail, and they are frankly or even agrantly physiological. These phenomena represent aspects of universal physiological experience. At their sensory poles, symbols may stand for breast milk, blood, male and female genitalia etc. These highly physiological and sensory themes may represent ideological values, however, such as the unity and solidarity of a group, or domestic values (Turner, 1967, 27–29). This is the case in the tribal societies studied by Turner, and it will not be difcult to nd examples in the more complex societies of so-called high civilizations. (2) A second criterion for signs is their precision, their capacity to transmit clearly differentiated and unequivocal information. One of the dilemmas of communication via symbols is the difculty of combining precision with sensory qualities. One of the most striking peculiarities of sensory signs is that they are indeed ‘gross’ in the rst sense distinguished by Turner. They are multivocal and open to diverse and even contradictory interpretations. If precision and unambiguity are to be attained, signs must have demarcated meanings. An arsenal of differentiated signs is therefore required, distinct from one another and overlapping as little as possible. Scholars use a variety of terms to denote such signs. A distinction is frequently made between ‘symbols’ and ‘signs’, symbols being open-ended, multivocal and presentational, signs being univocal and unambiguous, i.e. precisely dened and demarcated. Verbal signs are

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sometimes denoted as ‘terms’. This distinction between signs and symbols is made by the Dutch liturgical scholar Gerard Lukken (Lukken 2005, 16–22), the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (f.i. Ricoeur, 1960, 21–25 and 1969, 16–17), the aforementioned anthropologist Victor Turner (f.i. Turner, 1967, 16) and the theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet (Chauvet, 1990, esp. 118–137). Confusion has arisen, however, because other scholars designate this category of signs by the term ‘symbols’: the semiotic scholar Algirdas J. Greimas calls them ‘symbolic systems’, whereas the semiotic scholar Charles Peirce employs the term ‘symbol’ for a category of signs that does not entirely match that of the ‘signs’ referred to here, but is closely related (Lukken, 2005, 75–78.92–93). Whatever the case may be, if signs are to attain the highest precision, rules are required to restrict ambiguity of meaning. In order to comprehend and employ these signs, considerable intellectual effort will be needed to master such conventional rules. Spoken and written language, obviously, is generally more precise than non-verbal (visual) language. As Langer remarked—and Lukken in her footsteps—verbal language tends to be discursive, employing separate, demarcated units of meaning arranged in a specic order, strung together ‘like beads on a rosary’ (Langer, 1979, 80). It should be noted, however, that the distinction between presentational and discursive signs is not synonymous with that between verbal and nonverbal language. On the one hand, not all types of verbal language are precise, unambiguous and discursive to the same degree. Abstract, scientic language is much more so than poetic language, which has in common with non-verbal signs that it may evoke multiple meanings—exactly as it is intended to do! On the other hand, trafc signs are not meant to evoke associations but to transmit messages based on specic regulations which must be learned! (3) A third criterion by which signs may be distinguished, to some extent related to the second, is the degree to which they allow the recipient to escape from the here and now by supplying information about hypothetical or imaginary matters. More specically, to what extent do signs allow us to communicate about the past or future, about events that have already taken place or will do so in the future? Verbal language plays a unique and irreplaceable role here, as the cultural anthropologist Roy Rappaport has stressed (Rappaport, 1999, esp. 4–5, 54; Rappaport, 1979, 173–221). Verbal discourse on the past or future is basically dependent on words. This does not mean that scenes of the

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past or future cannot be represented by non-verbal imagery, for instance pictorial, for it often has the potential to evoke the past or future more powerfully than words. That a certain picture or sculpture refers to those realities, however, will only become evident to the beholder if it is explained by words or if he shares a common religious or cultural tradition with the artist. In the latter case, the scene in question will automatically be associated with the envisioned reality. (4) A nal criterion for the classication of signs and symbols is the type of relationship between the sign and the object to which it refers, i.e. to that which is signied. A large and confusing number of terms is used in scholarly publications to distinguish several sorts and degrees of relationships which may or may not overlap. What is more, the terminology of some scholars is far from consistent (Bell, 1997, 62–68, esp. 64–65. Cf. Leach, 1976, 9–16). As it is not possible to go into this at length in the present article, I shall conne myself to a valuable and elucidating distinction made by the semiotic scholar Charles Peirce (Peirce, 1960, 143ff.; Buchler, 1955; Burks 1949; Van Zoest, 1978; Rappaport, 1999, 54–68; Lukken, 2005, 76–78; Bieritz, 2004, 209–214). Peirce has distinguished three sorts of signs (which may partially overlap): symbol, icon and index. Symbols in the Peircian sense of the word are signs associated with what they signify merely by convention or law. In themselves, there is no relation between the sign and the signied. The only reason why a certain sign signies something, and has a specic meaning, is that a certain group of people commonly attribute the meaning to the sign. In general, the ‘signs’ mentioned under (2) fall into this category, and this also holds for much verbal language, whether spoken or written. Seemingly natural meanings, which immediately spring to mind, prove on closer inspection to be open to multiple interpretations; abstraction is therefore required in order to establish a precise denition. Whereas the relationship between a symbol and the reality to which it refers is purely arbitrary, the most striking characteristic of icons is their resemblance to what is signied. A ne example of an ‘icon’ in the Peircian sense is a geographical map. But all forms of art that can be qualied as ‘realistic’, such as a photograph or portrait, may generally be included. Although icons are frequently visual signs, this is not necessarily the case, since verbal signs and sounds can also be iconic. The sound of

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onomatopoeic words, for example, or a particular piece of music, can imitate another sound which it is intended to represent. Alliteration in a literary text may indicate that the realities to which reference is made have something in common. Likewise, the order of the words may have been deliberately chosen to suggest a climax in the reality referred to. Both forms of iconic language are illustrated by Caesar’s famous words: ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (Van Zoest, 1978, 85–86). Semiotic scholars following in the footsteps of Peirce also speak of iconic language when a certain reality expressed in words refers in turn to another reality. A specic category of iconic language includes literary phenomena in which the primary meaning is deliberately used to refer to another reality. The parable is an example of this type of iconic language, which is sometimes described as ‘metaphorical’ (Van Zoest, 1978, 89–91) and is common in poems and novels. The words of the parable of the Good Samaritan tell a story which is not just a story but an icon of a different reality, comparable to an allegory (cf. Van Zoest, 1978, 89–90). One of the principal characteristics of a literary allegory is that the primary meaning of a story, sentence or proposition denotes another reality, or is understood to do so by interpreters or exegetes. Thus the vicissitudes of Odysseus, of Israel liberated from Egypt and wandering through the desert, or of K the antihero of Kafka’s The Process, lend themselves to interpretation as allegories of the vicissitudes of humankind. These forms of metaphorical iconic language, with their indirect sensory qualities, enable rather abstract realities to be described in a more telling manner than philosophical treatises: they appeal to the imagination and therefore indirectly to the senses as well, and, more specically, to the visual faculty. Finally, an index is a sign that is not founded on convention alone: it actually has some specic relationship with what it signies, but not one based on resemblance: an index ‘indicates’ a certain object because it is somehow connected with it. For instance, a cloud is often a forebode of rain and is therefore an index of rain. Judges and some Protestant ministers wear gowns when performing their ofcial duties, and the gown is therefore an index of their respective ofces. Indices usually have a strong sensory and presentational character and may consequently have a direct and powerful impact on the beholder. As Roy Rappaport has emphasised, they are particularly suitable for the transmission of what he has called self-referential messages, i.e. information concerning the current physical, psychic or social status or condition of a person

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(Rappaport, 1999, esp. 54 and ch. 3 (pp. 69–106); Rappaport, 1979, 179). At the same time, they are unable to transmit detailed information about what Rappaport has called ‘canonical messages’—messages not primarily concerned with the immediate, but rather with the enduring, with more complicated issues concerning the world, ethical values, and philosophical or religious concepts. As mentioned above(cf. Rappaport, 1999, esp. 4–5, 54; Rappaport, 1979, 173–221), for the transmission of such messages Rappaport emphasises that we are largely dependent on words in the category of conventional and arbitrary signs, whether iconic or not, and often in combination with non-verbal icons. Needless to say, distinctions between symbols, icons and indices in the Peircian sense are not watertight (Lukken, 2005, 79) and are indeed not intended to be so by Peirce. A symbol in the Peircian sense of the word may have or may acquire an indexical value, as a visual index may have or may obtain iconic properties. Indices and icons are to a degree conventional, and so on. Signs and symbols in a ritual context Signs and symbols cannot be examined and understood without taking into account the context in which they are used. They may serve various purposes, depending on the situation. When people transmit signs, they not only say but also do something. One of the intentions of communication by signs or symbols is the desire to transmit precise information on a specic object or issue, information which may be true or false. In many cases, however, this is not the only or even primary purpose. To give an example, when one is told that “the dog bites”, this is more than just a statement about the character of the dog! Of essential importance to the study of rituals is the fact that signs and symbols may fulll a range of functions that have nothing to do with the transmission of precise and objective information. They may serve to evoke a certain atmosphere, or to express feelings or emotions. They may also be employed to intensify a sense of belonging to the same community. Or they may be used to convince people of a particular matter, to persuade them to do something, to stir them, to transport them into a sort of trance or to manipulate them. A number of philosophers have elaborated on this aspect of spoken and written language. The so-called speech-act-theory developed by

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John Austin (Austin, 1970) and John Searle (Searle, 1996) has proved particularly inuential in the eld of ritual and liturgical studies (Cf. Bell, 1997, 68–69; Rappaport, 1999, 113–115; Bieritz, 2004). According to Austin and Searle, verbal utterances are speech acts that may be performed with a variety of intentions such as giving orders, promising, convincing, warning or socialising. To explain this so-called performative dimension and the performative force of human language, both authors distinguish three aspects that play a role in every speech act: the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary element. The rst of these is the production of the utterance as such; the second is the desired effect on the hearer, and the third is the actual effect on the hearer. Austin and Searle have argued that the illocutionary aspect is of primary importance to the analysis of speech acts. Of particular signicance for the study of ritual acts is that Searle has drawn attention to specic indicators that reveal the illocutionary character and force of speech acts (Searle, 1996, 30; Kubicki, 1999, 149–152). He discusses phenomena such as word order, stress, intonation, repetition and so-called performative verbs which denote certain acts such as warning, promising, declaring or thanking. Some of these indicators, incidentally, are similar to the use of iconic language mentioned above. I would argue that the distinctions made by Austin and Searle are not only relevant to the study of speech acts, but also to that of all verbal or non-verbal human utterances, and therefore to the study of signs and symbols used in rituals. The question should be addressed as to what people actually do when they communicate by means of signs and symbols in a ritual, liturgical context. I would like to make the following observations on this question. 1. Firstly, it is important to note that the primary aim of rituals, as opposed to an academic lecture for example, is not to transmit exact information. If this were the case, one might wonder why people attend the same ritual, such as Mass, thousands of times, where they rarely receive much information that is really new to them. Some scholars, however, have defended the view that rituals have no meaning (Staal, 1975, 2–22; C. Bell, 1992).4 This is obviously a controversial point of view, but in so far as it implies that the primary function of ritual is not

4 Bell is extremely critical of the tendency among social scholars to consider rituals as texts containing messages about religious beliefs and ideas.

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to transmit objective information as effectively as possible, it contains an element of truth. 2. Rituals are complex forms of communication in the sense that they employ a variety of signs, both verbal and non-verbal. Consequently, the combination and interaction of different types of signs is a matter of importance. Visual and verbal signs may complement one other. The ambiguity of a sensory, evocative and indexical non-verbal sign can be removed or reduced by means of text or a verbal explanation employing precise but perhaps rather abstract language. Likewise, spoken or chanted texts can compensate for the incapacity of visual signs alone to transcend the here and now. However, the illocutionary dimension of the verbal language used is affected by the non-verbal elements accompanying it (as indeed is the case with every speech act). It is interesting to note that the anthropologist Stanley Tambiah has pointed out the effect produced on rituals by the combination of various ‘media’, i.e. verbal and non-verbal forms of expression (Tambiah, 1979, 113–169. (Reprinted in: Tambiah 1985). According to Tambiah, in combination these various media enhances the ‘performative’ character of ritual and indeed its force (and in a sense its magical character). More specically, in combination they may produce a sense of heightened, intensied and integrated communication between human beings, and between human beings and a divine realm (Tambiah, 1985, 145. Tambiah mentions mainly auditive elements, such as intonation, solemn recitation, declamation and singing. However, I would argue that the combination of verbal language with visual elements (symbols, images, visible gestures and vestments) may play a prominent role as well. 3. Liturgical celebrations refer to and evoke a sacred world, an atmosphere of holiness, as was certainly the case in the Middle Ages. This implies a tremendous paradox, for while signs and symbols are indispensable to evoke this sacred realm, it is at the same time transcendent and ineffable, and cannot be described or represented without the risk of idolatry. Most religions warn against idolatry, and the Old Testament forbids the making and worshipping of images of the divine (Ex. 20:4.2; Deut. 27:15). This dilemma can be described more precisely in terms of different categories of signs and symbols. I would like to suggest that two categories of signs are particularly liable to the risk of idolatry. Firstly, ‘icons’, especially visual ones that are characterised, in the Peircian sense of the word, by close resemblance to what is signied. Secondly, the precise and discursive signs employed in academic language, which may create the illusion that an arsenal of

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highly differentiated terms matches divine reality and helps us to get a grip on it. The greatest danger, incidentally, lies in a combination of the two, namely when ‘icons’ are combined with elaborate verbal language, especially if it is discursive. The risk of idolatry is considerably reduced if multivocal signs and symbols of a rather indexical nature are employed, pointing towards the divine realm rather than describing, predicating or representing it. I would like to argue that both visual and verbal signs may function in this way. The former should be abstract rather than realistic, and the latter should appeal to the imagination rather than the intellect—in other words, they should be poetical rather than conceptual and abstract. Word and image in the liturgical traditions of early Christian Rome (4th–7th centuries) The above observations on the role of various types of signs and symbols in ritual contexts allow us to sketch a differentiated picture of the development of western liturgy in the early Middle Ages, when the liturgical usages of the city of Rome were introduced north of the Alps. Let us start with a brief sketch of the relationship between verbal and non-verbal elements in Rome in Late Antiquity (4th–7th centuries). There can be no doubt that non-verbal elements, including visual ones, played an important role in the liturgical celebrations held in the churches of Rome in Late Antiquity. The main liturgical events, including baptism by immersion, pre-baptismal and post-baptismal anointing and the Eucharist, all had a strong visual dimension. The architecture of the churches should also be borne in mind, as well as pictorial representations (mosaics, paintings and vestments), processions and the gestures of celebrants. All such visual signs will doubtlessly have transformed these celebrations into multi-sensory experiences, evoking all sorts of associations among the faithful. Some signs functioned primarily as icons in the Peircian sense of the word, including the Eucharistic bread and wine representing the Body and Blood of Christ, and the descent into, and ascent from, the baptismal water, depicting the death and resurrection of the person baptised (Cf. Bieritz, 2004, 210). Many other visual symbols will have had the effect of indices. In spite of these non-verbal elements, however, verbal language held a very prominent place, and these celebrations must have been largely

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word-centred rituals. This emerges clearly from the oldest surviving sources, especially sacramentaries, lectionaries and antiphonaries, whose content consists almost entirely of texts. Allusions to non-verbal elements, such as gestures, are not entirely lacking, and rather detailed descriptions are sometimes found in the ordines romani; compared to later sources, however, their number is limited. A striking example is provided by the celebration of Palm Sunday in Rome: there was no procession with the consecrated palms, and the main element was the reading of the entire passion according to Matthew (Auf der Maur, 1983, 98–101; Klauser, 1969, 81). The papal celebration of Good Friday basically consisted of the reading of the passion according to John and the prayers of intercession (without the Adoration of the Cross or the Eucharist) (Auf der Maur, 1983, 107–113; Klauser, 1969, 81). Likewise, the rites of ordination (of bishops, priests and deacons) comprised only an ordination prayer and the laying on of hands by one or more bishops (Santantoni, 2000, 217–252, esp. 217–226). The verbal language itself certainly had visual aspects, for ample use was made of what we have called metaphorical iconic language. This will certainly have appealed to the imagination of the faithful and have had a representational effect upon them. In combination with the stimuli of other directly visible elements, it may also have reinforced the performative character of the liturgical celebrations. This was also enhanced, incidentally, by the frequent use of numerous literary devices such as parallellismus membrorum, alliteration, dramatic composition, redundancy, repetition of words and phrases and, last but not least, the manner in which texts were declaimed or chanted (see f.i. Rouwhorst, 2002, 28–30). At the same time, it should be observed that the verbal language of Roman liturgical prayers is notorious for its sobriety and precision (see f.i. Chupungco, 1997, 137–139). With the exception of some particularly complex texts, such as the Eucharistic prayer (Roman Canon) and the blessing of the baptismal font (Rouwhorst, 2001, 963–979), most Roman prayers are short and very clearly structured. Metaphoric icons occur frequently, but they are rarely elaborated in detail. In contrast to texts derived from Gallican or Spanish liturgical traditions (see f.i. Rose, 2005, 161–183), narrative descriptions of biblical or hagiographical scenes are entirely absent. In addition, many Roman liturgical prayer texts are characterised by a remarkable theological precision. They betray sophisticated and well-balanced views on issues such as sacrice, the

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incarnation, and the relationship between nature and grace (theologians will not miss subtle allusions to certain Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian ideas) (cf. Wegman, 1988, 27–31). These elements contributed to the discursive and in some respects intellectual character of such texts. This must have had an effect upon the faithful, who heard them in their own language, even allowing for the fact that some theological niceties will certainly have eluded most of them. The growing importance of visual elements in western Europe in the early Middle Ages The character of ancient Roman liturgical traditions changed drastically when they were introduced in the Frankish realm, globally speaking in present-day France and Germany, merging with Frankish and Germanic traditions in a process of thorough inculturation. This had far-reaching implications for many aspects of liturgical ritual and in particular for the relationship between word and image. Whereas verbal language tended to predominate over visual elements in Rome, the opposite occurred north and northwest of the Alps, where visual elements rapidly grew in importance, as the following phenomena illustrate. (1) Ancient Roman prayer texts incorporated in sacramentaries underwent relatively little change. To some extent this may have been out of respect for and delity to Roman liturgical traditions considered to be both venerable and normative. But it may also betray a lack of interest in the content of the texts, and this presumption is reinforced by the fact that medieval liturgical commentaries that ourished from the period of Amalarius of Metz onwards pay relatively little attention to the content of prayer texts. Incidentally, even if a certain educated elite remained interested in its rich theological content, the fact remains that most of the faithful had no access to it for the simple reason that they did not understand Latin. This obviously implies that visual aspects of the texts, based on metaphorical icons, eluded them as well! At the same time, it should be emphasized that the visual signs that were not directly related to the texts, lacked the capacity of verbal language to escape from the here and now, to express the past and future, and to clarify ambiguities. (2) The marginalisation of texts and the diminishing importance of verbal language went hand in hand with an immense growth of

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non-verbal and in particular visual elements such as gestures and symbols. Among the many examples are the introduction of the blessing of the palms and the procession on Palm Sunday, the elaboration of the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday (absent even in the papal liturgy), the introduction of the unction of the hands of the bishop and priest in the ritual of ordination, the vesting of the priest with the chasuble, and the transmitting of the chalice and paten (Klauser, 1969, 81–82; Santantoni, 2000, 226–235). A particularly striking example is the blessing of the baptismal water (Rouwhorst, 1995, 158–160; Coebergh, 1965, 260–319, esp. 296–310). The ancient Roman ritual preserved in the Old Gelasian Sacramentary contained but one sign of the cross by the priest. Two candles may have been placed in the font to symbolise the mixing of light and water, a theme to which the prayer texts refer. From the Carolingian period onwards, many visual elements were added to the ancient Roman nucleus. Thus, the priest divided the baptismal water with his hands in the form of a cross, «signed» it with a triple sign of the cross, touched the water with his hand, breathed on it, put a candle in the water three times, and put chrism and oil of catechumens in it. Instead of a text accompanied by some basic gestures, the ritual became a play of visual gestures and symbols, the gestures overgrowing the Latin texts like ivy (at any rate for those unable to understand the texts). (3) Liturgical commentaries current from the Carolingian period onwards focus particularly on visual elements. Significantly, they elaborate on various elements that may have evoked associations in an indexical way but had not been commented on before: church bells, the liturgical vestments of the bishop, priest and deacon, their sandals, and the gestures performed by the priest or bishop.5 Explanations of these ‘outward’, visible elements were based on the so-called allegorical method, according to which visual elements may be understood as icons of a different reality. Thus visible aspects of liturgical life were related to temple rituals in the Old Testament, to Christ or scenes from his life or to eschatological realities such as life after death or the

5

See for instance Amalarius of Metz, Liber ofcialis, II, 16–26 (ed. I. Hanssens, 237–254); Rupert of Deutz, Liber de divinis ofciis I, 16–27 (ed. H. Haacke), 13–23; Honorius of Autun, Gemma animae, ch. 198–224 (PL 172), 604–614; William Durandus, Rationale divinorum ofciorum I, 4 and III. (ed. Davril-Thibodeau), 52–57, 177–239.

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Last Judgement. They were sometimes also understood in a tropological manner, providing a basis for moral exhortation (cf. f.i. Suntrup, 1978, 61–66). Conclusions At the beginning of this paper the question was raised of the shift from a predominantly text-oriented to a strongly visual liturgy and its effect on the execution and reception of ritual. In response to this I would like to formulate a number of hypotheses which will hopefully stimulate further research and discussion. a. One of the main consequences of the marginalisation of textual and verbal elements in early-medieval western liturgy was that it became more ambiguous, multivocal and therefore more mysterious. A ritual play of gestures employing visual symbols, accompanied by texts chanted or whispered in a foreign language, usually evokes an atmosphere of mystery. In the context of religious ritual this may be considered as a positive element, though it also implies a number of serious limitations, and provides little opportunity for the expression and articulation of specic ideas essential to Christian belief. b. The introduction of new visual elements must have reinforced the dramatic and performative character of liturgical celebrations. In a masterful description of early-medieval liturgy (Angenendt, 1978–79, 28–55; 1997, 351–421), the German historian Arnold Angenendt has pointed out the tendency to stress the ‘power’ (Latin: virtus) and effectiveness of liturgical rituals rather than their ‘symbolic’meaning, adding that they were believed to confer ‘blessing’ (benedictio) on the participants. This ‘power of blessing’ was transmitted by means of specic physical elements such as bread, wine, oil, water and palm branches. These were assumed to ‘work’ in and beyond the liturgical celebration and to have not only spiritual, but also physical and material effects, such as offering protection against illness, epidemics, drought and war. Emphasis on the effectiveness of rituals, on their ‘magical’ character if one will, had far-reaching implications for the role of the clergy in general and priests in particular. Rather than proclaiming and explaining the Word of God, their main task came to consist of blessing and consecrating. In describing the rise of this concept of liturgy and the underlying religious ‘mentality’, Angenendt, conspicuously, does not discuss the

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shift from word to image at any length. This aspect undoubtedly played a prominent role, however, and in my opinion its precise relationship with the phenomena mentioned by Angenendt deserves further study. c. Allegorical elements played a crucial role in compensating for the limitations of a predominantly visual liturgy. They counterbalanced the vagueness of the various iconic and indexical signs, and conveyed messages essential to the Christian faith, and views on the world, that could not be conveyed by visual signs alone. Viewed from this perspective, there is little reason for unbalanced criticism of allegorical interpretations of liturgical rites. Liturgical scholars commonly claim that allegorical interpretations are articial, rationalist and conventional, turning ‘every word and object into an instruction, often with a precise meaning or designation’ (Senn, 1997, 5–6; Jungmann, 1952, I, 114–120; Lukken, 2005, 18–19. For a more differentiated and prudent attitude: Driscoll, 2006, 175–215, esp. 192). They do not deny that allegorical interpretations of liturgical celebrations ascribe meanings to visual elements that are not self-evident; they have to be learned, and they appeal to the intellect and tend to become conventional, as is the case with trafc signs. Obviously, allegorical elements can become exhausted and go to seed, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga demonstrated with reference to the late Middle Ages (Huizinga, 1986, 203–215). However, it is important to distinguish between the allegorical interpretation of texts, consisting of words, and that of open-ended visual signs. It is also necessary to take into account the historical context in which the allegorical interpretation of liturgy arose. d. One of the consequences of the allegorical interpretation of visual signs and rites is a tendency to emphasise their iconic qualities, that is, to accentuate and to maximize the resemblance between the sign and the signied, the reality to which it is supposed to refer. This has a twofold effect upon the rituals concerned. On the one hand, it encourages their further xation and canonisation. Once a ritual has become an iconic sign or a cluster of iconic signs, changing it may amount to the elimination of a visible trace of a sacred reality. At the same time, in the eyes of those anxious to safeguard the transcendence of that reality, the danger of idolatry is just around the corner. Insight into the shift from a word- and text-oriented liturgy to one that was strongly visual in the early Middle Ages can also shed new light on liturgical reforms—in particular those of the Reformation and the Second Vatican Council—that opposed the visual liturgy of the Middle

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Ages and pursued a liturgy that focused on the proclamation of the Word. In order to understand these reform movements it is necessary to comprehend the complex and variegated spectrum of signs and symbols that were under re, and which, in turn, were soon to be replaced by an equally complex spectrum, albeit in a different way. LITERATURE Primary literature Amalarius of Metz, Liber ofcialis. Ed. I. Hanssens. In: Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia II, Città del Vaticano, 1948, 237–254. Explication de la Divine Liturgie. Ed. N. Cabasilas. Traduction et notes de S. Salaville. 2e éd. munie du texte grec, revue et augmentée par R. Bornert, J. Gouillard, P. Périchon, Paris, 1967 (SC 4bis). Honorius of Autun, Gemma animae, in PL 172, 604–614. Il commentario liturgico di S. Germano patriarca Constantinopolitano e versione latina di Anastasio Bibliotecario. E. Borgia (ed.) Grottaferrata, 1912 (Studi liturgici 1). Rupert of Deutz, Liber de divinis ofciis I. ed. H. Haacke. In CCCM 7, Turnhout, 1967. William Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum I, 4 and III. ed A. Davril and M. Thibodeau, in: CCCM 140, Turnhout, 1995. Secondary literature Angenendt, A., ‘Religiosität und Theologie. Ein spannungsreiches Verhältnis im Mittelalter’, in Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 20/21 (1978/79), 28–55. ———, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter, Darmstadt, 1997. Asselt, W. van, ‘The Prohibition of Images and Protestant Identity’, in: W. v. Asselt, P. van Geest, D. Müller, Th. Salemink, Iconoclasm and Iconoclash. Struggle for Religious Identity. Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2007. Auf der Maur, H., Feiern im Rhythmus der Zeit I, Regensburg, 1983 (= Gottesdienst der Kirche. Handbuch der Liturgiewissenschaft 5). Austin, J., How to do Things with Words, Oxford, 1970. Bell, C., Ritual Theory. Ritual Practice, New York-Oxford, 1992. ———, Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions, New York-Oxford 1997. Bieritz, K.-H., Liturgik, Berlin-New York, 2004. Bornert, R., Les commentaries byzantins de la divine liturgie du VII e au XV e siècle, Paris, 1966. Buchler, J., The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, New York, 1955. Burks, A., ‘Icon, index and symbol’, in Philosophic and Phenomenological Research 9 (1949), 673–689. Chauvet, L.-M., Symbole et sacrement. Une relecture sacramentelle de l’existence chrétienne, Paris, 1990. Chupungco, A., ‘History of the Roman Liturgy Until the Fifteenth Century’, in: A. Chupungco (ed.), Handbook for Liturgical Studies. Vol. I. Introduction to the Liturgy, Collegeville, 1997, 131–152. Coebergh, C., ‘Problèmes de l’Evolution historique et de la Structure Littéraire de la «Benedictio Fontis» du Rit Romain’, in Sacris Erudiri 16 (1965). Driscoll, M., ‘The Conversion of the Nations’, in: G. Wainwright, K. Westereld Tucker (ed.), The Oxford History of Christian Worship, Oxford, 2006.

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Hope, D., ‘The Medieval Western Rites’, in: C. Jones, G. Wainwright, E. Yarnold (ed.), The Study of Liturgy, London 19783. Huizinga, J., Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, Groningen, 198620. Hussey, J., McNulty, P., Nicholas Cabasilas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, London, 1960. Jetter, W., Symbol und Ritual. Anthropologische Elemente im Gottesdienst, Göttingen, 19862. Jungmann J., Missarum sollemnia, Wien, 19523. Kavanagh, A., On Liturgical Theology, Collegeville, 1992. Klauser, Th., A Short History of the Western Liturgy, London-New York-Toronto, 1969. Kubicki, J. Liturgical Music as Ritual Symbol. A Case Study of Jacques Berthier’s Taizé Music, Louvain, 1999. Langer, S., Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, Cambridge (Mass.)-London, 19793. Leach, E., Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Connected, Cambridge, 1976. Lorenzer, A., Das Konzil der Buchhalter. Die Zerstörung der Sinnlichkeit. Eine Religionskritik, Frankfurt am Main, 1984. Lukken, G., Rituals in Abundance, Louvain, 2005. Meyendorff, P., St. Germanus of Constantinople. On the Divine Liturgy, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999. Peirce, C., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 2. Ed. by C. Hartsthorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge (Mass.), 1960. Rappaport, R., ‘The Obvious Aspects of Ritual’, in: id., Ecology, Meaning and Religion, Berkeley, 1979, 173–221. ———, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge, 1999. Ricoeur, P., Finitude et culpabilité II, La symbolique du mal, Paris, 1960. ———, Le conit des interpretations. Essais d’herméneutique, Paris, 1969. Rose, E., ‘Hagiography as a liturgical act: Liturgical and hagiographic commemoration in the early Middle Ages’, in M. Barnard, P. Post and E. Rose (eds.), A Cloud of Witnesses. The Cult of Saints in Past and Present, Leuven 2005, 161–183. Rouwhorst, G., ‘Baumstark’s Methodology in Practice: Historical Research on the Blessing of Baptismal Water in the Roman Liturgy’, in R. Taft and G. Winkler (ed.), Acts of the International Congress Comparative Liturgy Fifty Years after Anton Baumstark (1872–1948), Rome 2001, 963–979 (OCA 265). ———, ‘De kracht van water. De wijding van het doopwater in de Romeinse liturgie van de late Oudheid tot aan het einde van de Middeleeuwen’, in M. Mostert, A. Demyttenaere (eds.), De betovering van het middeleeuwse christendom. Studies over ritueel en magie in de Middeleeuwen, Hilversum, 1995, 129–170. ———, ‘The Design of sung eucharistic prayer in the tradition’, in A. Vernooij (ed.), Liturgy and Muse. The Eucharistic Prayer, Louvain, 2002, 13–36. Santantoni, A., ‘Ordination and Ministries in the West’, in A. Chupungco (ed.), Handbook for Liturgical Studies, vol. IV. Sacraments and Sacramentals, Collegeville, 2000, 217–252. Schulz, H.J. Die byzantinische Liturgie. Glaubenszeugnis und Symbolgestalt, Trier 1980. Searle, J., Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge, 1996 (rst print 1969). Senn, F., Christian Liturgy. Catholic and Evangelical, Minneapolis, 1997. Staal, F., ‘The Meaninglessness of Ritual’, in Numen 26 (1975), 2–22. Suntrup, R., Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden und Bewegungen in lateinischen und deutschen Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts, München, 1978. Taft, R., The Byzantine Rite. A Short History, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992. Tambiah, S., ‘A Performative Approach to Ritual’, in Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979), 113–169 (Repr. in id., Culture, Thought, and Social Action. An Anthropological Perspective, Cambridge (Mass.), 1985, 123–166).

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Turner, V., ‘Symbols in Ndembu Ritual’, in: id, The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca-London, 1967, 19–47. Wegman, H., ‘De Romeinse euchologie in de Quadragesima. Verandering van paradigma?, in Jaarboek voor Liturgie-onderzoek 4 (1988), 5–40. Zoest, A. van, Semiotiek. Over tekens, hoe ze werken en wat we ermee doen, Baarn, 1978.

4. SEEING THE DIVINE: A HOLY CONTROVERSY Alexander Even-Chen (Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies) Introduction Iconoclasm has never been a big issue in Judaism. The prophets, wise men, and all those who followed them were meticulous in observing the commandment: ‘You shall not make for yourself any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth’ (Exodus 20:4). Although certain movements within Jewish mysticism tended to describe God in a rather anthropomorphic way, religious leaders of Jewish tradition were wary of transgressing the commandment cited above. According to their opinion mankind is in no way able to grasp God’s transcendental being through physical reality. In relation to the iconoclash theme of this volume, I shall discuss an issue that is only indirectly connected to it; an issue which in my opinion seems to focus on a more basic question in the Jewish tradition. This question can be summarized as follows: Is it possible for mankind to ‘see’ God by reaching out to Him through a spiritual, emotional, rational or mystic elation? In order to nd an answer to this question I shall examine Abraham Joshua Heschel’s interpretation of two topics that were discussed in the Jewish tradition: (1) is it possible for mankind to ‘see’ God, and (2) is it possible for God to ‘see’ mankind? Life and Work of Heschel Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the foremost Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Many contemporaries consider him to be source of great inspiration, while others have criticized him sharply for his ideas. But no one who has become acquainted with his work can remain indifferent to the spiritual power he shows in his writings. For his readers, his work remains fascinating and compelling, because he embodied a rare blend of academic research, faith and involvement in public affairs.

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Heschel (1907–1972) was born in Warsaw as a descendant of a highly respected lineage of Hassidic rabbis and died in New York. Kaplan and Dresner introduce their biographical study of Heschel with the following words: ‘This is the story of a man of prayer, compassion and courage confronting an increasingly horrifying world’ (Kaplan and Dresner 1998, vii). Heschel’s entire life corresponded with this characterization. He began his studies at the traditional schools for religious studies (yeshiva’s), and after spending some years at the University of Berlin, he left Nazi Germany for the United States. After his arrival there in 1940 he became gradually involved in the American academic world and displayed a great interest in many spiritual and political activities of the day. Heschel was deeply involved in Martin Luther King’s struggle for civil rights. There is still a famous picture dating from 1965 and showing him marching on with Martin Luther King. In a later comment on this event he wrote that his legs were praying at that time, for in his view ghting for civil rights was a religious precept. He also did his very best to promote inter-religious dialogue by claiming that no religion can or may monopolize ‘holiness’: ‘God wills that his voice shall be heard in different ways; therefore He assigns different roles to different nations’ (Even-Chen 2006, 367). With Heschel, this idea was basic for any interreligious enterprise. While studying at the University of Berlin, Heschel did not severe himself from his Jewish roots, but tried to nd additional means to clarify the meaning of human existence. In his writings during this period he shared many of his equivocations and expectations with his readers by stating that, when coming to Berlin, he expected to nd answers to his existential questions. For that reason he embarked on the study of philosophy, but was deeply disappointed to learn that these questions were not the main concern of his teachers. In the United States, following the footsteps of his spiritual forebears, he tried to blend his spiritual experience with academic studies. In his public appearance he embodied the spirit of the old prophets in his own unique way. Throughout his life time he was guided by a permanent quest for a deep bond with God which is apparent in all of his publications. Therefore, Kaplan’s claim that a deep personal religious experience is at the basis of his works, seems to be justied. It was no accident that he made frequent use of poetic language in order to share this basic experience with his readers.

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He developed his views extensively in two of his main books, entitled Man is not Alone and God in Search of Man. In these two volumes he presented a religious existentialist philosophy by trying to describe the nature of the encounter and relationship between God and man, an encounter he thought not easily to be attained. In the following sections I will discuss the two main questions that exemplify Heschel’s theological enterprise. Two Central Questions Heschel’s theology may be characterized by an attempt to nd an answer to two fundamental questions: ‘Is it possible to see God’ and ‘is it possible to be seen by God’. According to Heschel, the answer to the rst question implies the answer to the second one, because divine revelation is impossible without the revelation of man. In his own words: ‘prophecy consists of a revelation of God and a co-revelation of man’ (Heschel 1995, 261). In contrast to the mystics, the religious experience of the prophets did not only concern man in search of God, but also God in search of man. According to Heschel, ‘the mystic experience is man’s turning toward God, the prophetic act is God’s turning toward man’. And: ‘The mystic experience is an ecstasy of man; revelation is an ecstasy of God’ (Heschel 1955, 198–199). Heschel’s conception of God, therefore, should not be identied with a theology that presents God as a hidden God. Heschel’s God is a God who wants to be seen and it is man who is hiding from God: ‘Man was the rst one to hide himself from God after having eaten the forbidden fruit, and he is still hiding himself.’ (Heschel 1951a, 153). ‘Where are thou?’ is therefore God’s eternal question addressing mankind. It is Heschel’s aim and intention to equip man in such a way that he is able again to hear this quest of God. Seeing God One of the chapters of Heschel’s book Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations is entitled ‘Beholding the Face of God’. In this book, rst published in 1962, he presented a wide range of theological ideas of the Jewish sages on this subject. It should not be read as a theological treatise, but rather as an essay published after his theological works. His reading of rabbinic sources, therefore, was deeply inuenced by his

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theology. The chapter cited above starts with the clear statement that the rabbinic sources such as Midrash and Aggadah (rabbinic homiletics) should not be considered to be a form of imagination or merely a means to endorse the fullment of the Law. For Heschel, analyzing rabbinic sources means to discover ‘the concerns and wrestling, the ghts and yearnings, the eternal problems and timely questions (. . .) that preoccupied the sages and the nation’ (Heschel 1962, 300).1 Because the most important and ongoing question of mankind concerns the possibility of seeing God, Heschel wants to present to his readers the broad diversity of opinions regarding this theme by describing the main theological schools of thought that inuenced Jewish thought on this subject since it beginnings. He continues by saying that some of the sages thought that ‘seeing God’ referred to the possibility of achieving the highest spiritual experience, while others argued that ‘seeing God’ was impossible for humankind. Furthermore, Heschel pointed out that the ideas of the rst group of sages derived from the teachings of rabbi Akivah, while the ideas of the second group were attributed to the teachings of rabbi Ishmael. In addition, Heschel argued that this whole train of thought was ‘forgotten and suppressed, only its echoes and nuances remained’ (Heschel 1962, 302). Therefore, Heschel considered it to be his task to show the interrelationship of these theological schools and to present them as a coherent way of thought. He does not present a historical, philological or sociological research into these rabbinic sources. His main interest is to understand and explain the different theological opinions of the sages. It is worth noting that the full title of the volume mentioned above (henceforward Heavenly Torah) reects exactly Heschel’s concept of revelation. He argues that ‘the giving of the written Torah [the ve books of Moses] is the beginning, not the end of Torah’ (Heschel 1990, 663) and that therefore God’s revelation at Mount Sinai is not the end of revelation. He also emphasizes the fact that ‘no man is able to hear the voice of God as it is’ and that ‘God addressed every individual according to his own particular capacity of comprehension’ (Heschel 1955, 261). This remark explains Heschel’s claim that the revelation at Mount Sinai was the beginning of a process of revelation: generation after generation, the sages, according to their own capacities, were

1 These quotations are from the rst volume of the original Hebrew edition, which was published in 1962.

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able to hear the voice of God and thus interpreted God’s voice from a particular and new point of view. In the Bible we can identify two different opinions concerning the possibility of seeing God. Both are related to God’s answer to Moses’ request: ‘Show me, I pray, your glory’ (Exodus 33:18). Heschel points out that both rabbi Akivah and rabbi Ishmael based their views on two different interpretations of God’s answer: ‘Man may not see me and live’ (Exodus 33:20). Ishmael offered a literal interpretation of this answer, while Akivah’s interpretation was based on a different understanding of the word ‘man’. In his view this word in the Exodus verse refers to the angels and other heavenly being, who cannot see the glory of God and live. Human mortal beings, however, will be able to see the glory of God on the condition that they are worth it and deserve it (Heschel 1962, 305). In this context it is remarkable that rabbi Akivah only refers to the possibility of seeing the glory of God, since there may be a difference between God Himself and his glory. If that is the case we should endorse a more moderate interpretation of Akivah’s words. But then we have to face the difculty of explaining why the angels are unable to see the glory of God. Therefore, we surmise that Akivah does indeed refer to the ability of man to see God. In Psalm 42:3 we read: ‘My soul thirsts for God, the living God— when shall I come and see the face of God’. In Psalm 27:8 it is said: ‘Your face, o Lord, I will seek’. According to Heschel, these utterances are clear expressions of a mystical mind that wants to get closer to the divine presence. The thirst to see the face of God was, and still is, essential to the religious experience of many. In order to illustrate this experience Heschel refers to an old tradition that emphasizes the mystical character of rabbi Akivah’s school. It relates that Akivah was one of the four sages who have entered the Divine Orchard and that he was the only one who ‘ascended’ and ‘descended’ in peace (BT Hagigah 14b). Such mystic experiences were thought to be dangerous; only rabbi Akivah was able to achieve this ultimate spiritual experience without any damage (Heschel 1962, 282). Heschel also points to a tradition that tells that when rabbi Akivah ascended and saw the glory of God, certain angels tried to push him aside; but God spoke to them: ‘Let this venerable sage stay. He is worthy to behold my glory’. (Heschel 1962, 282). Thus the school of rabbi Akivah was confronted with a very difcult and critical question: are we too capable of achieving the spiritual

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experience that rabbi Akivah has achieved? This question was also the main theological topic discussed in another tradition to which Heschel refers: [Three] scholars lectured on the Merkabah [the mystical vision of the chariot by the prophet Ezekiel] before their masters: rabbi Joshua before rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai; rabbi Akivah before Joshua; Hananiah ben Hakhinai before Akivah. From that time on, however, minds were not longer receptive. (Heschel 1962, 281)

According to this tradition rabbi Akivah was the last person able to lecture on the highest spiritual experience. From this it becomes clear that the story reected a deep disappointment about the religious achievements of the Jewish mystic sages. It was assumed that after rabbi Akivah no one was able to see the glory of God. Another tradition attributed to rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, probably the author of the Zohar, reports ‘that sin disqualied Israel from seeing God; before the sin of the golden calf, they were able to see the glory of God . . .’ (Heschel 1962, 308). In contrast to this tradition, Heschel argues, the opinions of the school of rabbi Ishmael represented a rational trend in Jewish thought. Although he knew the tradition that presented rabbi Ishmael too as a mystic like rabbi Akivah, yet he depicted rabbi Ishmael as a more rationally oriented spiritual leader. How come? If we check the quotations in chapter 15 of Heavenly Torah, entitled ‘Go round the Orchard’, it becomes clear that Heschel quotes Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, as well as two other ancient mystic books, called Heikalot Zutrati and Heikalot Rabati (Heschel 1962, 284). The rst one describes the mystic ascent of rabbi Akivah to heaven; the second one describes the mystical ascent of rabbi Ishmael. According to both books only these two—rabbi Akivah and rabbi Ishmael—were able to see the glory of God. Supposing that Heschel knew both books it seems very unlikely that he was unaware of the traditions that refer to rabbi Ishmael’s ascent to heaven. To nd an answer to the question why he contrasted rabbi Ishmael as the rational thinker with rabbi Akivah as the mystical leader, it may be helpful to check again the quotations used by Heschel to describe the religious character of rabbi Ishmael. These quotations are taken from the classical rabbinic sources—Midrash and Talmud etc.—and not from the ancient mystic books mentioned above. It seems to me that Heschel’s decision to contrast rabbi Ishmael with rabbi Akivah was based on a personal preference and a theological

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decision. In my opinion, the ideas of both rabbi’s represented two different spiritual powers in Heschel’s own soul. From this it becomes clear why Heschel presented rabbi Ishmael as the one who taught that mortals can neither see nor comprehend the nature of the divine glory, while rabbi Akivah was seen by him as basing his view on the assumption that man created by God according to his image (Genesis 9:6) was in principle able to behold the divine glory and the divine presence (Heschel 1962, 303). In order to endorse this point Heschel quotes from the Zohar the following phrase: ‘Man’s image and likeness were derived from above; terrestrial man resembled heavenly man’ (Zohar II, 76a). In other words: the Zohar agrees with rabbi Akivah in assuming that man is qualied to introspection and that in doing so he is actually looking at the heavenly and creative power of the living God. In the Zohar the term ‘heavenly man’ is used to describe the ten celestial powers by which God has revealed Himself and created the world. It is noteworthy that Heschel claims that the controversy between the mystical school of rabbi Akivah and the more rational school of rabbi Ishmael is still going on in Jewish thought. It is at the basis of the very different interpretations of some fundamental issues in Jewish thought during all ages. To name just one example: the different interpretations dealing with the death of Moses. According to the school of Akivah, Moses ascended to heaven in the same way as Enoch did before him. Both Enoch and Moses did not die; they were deemed worthy to ascend to heaven. The school of rabbi Ishmael, however, presented the death of Moses as a natural event. Heschel’s Own View At this point it is interesting to see what Heschel’s own point of view has been in this controversy: is he a disciple of rabbi Ishmael or does he belong to rabbi Akivah’s school? Heschel’s view is clearly expressed in a quotation in which he describes the unique character of rabbi Akivah: Rabbi Akivah, too, opened wide the doors of his school. It was characteristic of him to inuence many. He would expound and sermonize in public and would teach Torah to individuals. (. . .) His fame travelled from one end of the world to the other.

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It is remarkable that Heschel’s description of rabbi Akivah exactly reects the image of the popular and mystic leaders of the Hasidic movement that was founded in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe by the Baal Shem Tov. Moreover, Heschel’s own family was a very distinguished Hasidic family. At the beginning of his book A Passion for Truth, Heschel offers an interesting portrait of the Baal Shem Tov and contrasts it with the character of rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk: [ The] Baal Shem gave me wings; the Kotsker encircled me with chains. I never had the courage to break the chains and entered into joys with my shortcomings in mind. I owe intoxication to the Baal Shem, to the Kotsker the blessings of humility (Heschel 1973, xv).

Heschel also says that it was difcult for him to make a choice between the two Hasidic leaders: his mind was ‘in Kotsk’ and his heart was with the Baal Shem Tov (Heschel 1973, xiv). In my view, the controversy between these two Hasidic rabbis is reected in the inner spiritual tensions in Heschel’s own soul. It seems to me that similar things can be said about the parallel controversy between rabbi Ishmael and rabbi Akivah. To Be Seen by God The presence of God is one of the main topics discussed in Heschel’s thought and in this context he confronts us with a very strong and deep theological question: [For] us, contemporaries and survivors of history’s most terrible horrors, it is impossible to meditate about the compassion of God without asking: Where is God? (Heschel 1951a, 151).

According to Heschel it is very difcult to experience God’s presence in a world full of violence and murder, since religious experience is only born when man is aware of the ‘continual marvel’ of existence (Heschel 1955, 49). In his theory of religious experience the sense of wonder plays an essential role: how can one sense this marvel when one’s friends, family, and people are being murdered? After what happened during the Second World War, it is extremely difcult to have the experience of wonder and any possibility to be aware of the presence of God seems to be destroyed. He deals with this existential problem in a chapter entitled ‘The Hiding God’. Like Maimonides he argues that not God is hidden, but man is:

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The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed to Him, His truth betrayed, His will deed, God withdraws. God did not depart of his own volition; He was expelled. God is in exile (Heschel 1951a, 153).

As we have seen, to ascend to heaven and to enter the palace of God was the highest spiritual goal that the ancient mystics of Israel tried to achieve. But it was seen as a dangerous enterprise and most of the time the doors of the divine palace were thought to be closed. Only mystics like rabbi Akivah were allowed to enter. Nowadays the situation is completely different, according to Heschel: ‘There are many doors through which we have to pass in order to enter the palace and none of them is locked’ (Heschel 1951a, 154). It is man who has closed the doors of this world, but God has opened all the doors in heaven, waiting for man to come. God is in exile. The prophets were men who have tried to open the doors of this world and to bring back God to the world. In this context Heschel quotes rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, a disciple of rabbi Akivah: ‘If you are my witnesses, I am God; if you are not my witnesses, I am not God’ (Sifre Deuteronomy 33, 5). In Heschel’s opinion this is one of the most powerful statements in rabbinic literature; it means that ‘God is not God unless we are his witnesses’ (Heschel 1969, 163). In other words: God needs human cooperation in order to enter again into the world: ‘There will be no redemption without the cooperation of man. Omnipotence as such will not work. God cannot function in the world without the help of man’ (Heschel 1969, 159). This phrase articulates the most important idea in Heschel’s theology and it shows that Heschel has abandoned the classical concept of divine omnipotence. His awareness of the theological danger implied in this concept is expressed in the following question: ‘Does not this doctrine diminish our image of the divine and limit our belief in the omnipotence of the Creator?’ (Heschel 1962, 118). In his view, a different understanding of the relation between the two divine attributes—God’s mercy and God’s power—is the source of very different theological answers to the existential problems of humankind. The rabbis discussed the same questions during a very problematic period of Jewish history. They saw the destruction of the Temple, the profanation of God’s name and the ‘humiliation’ of the house of Israel, and asked: ‘If there is mercy, there surely is no power; and if there is power, there is surely no mercy. For is it possible to maintain that the Holy and Blessed One empathizes well, but does not carry through?’

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(Heschel 1962, 118). Asking these questions should have been very painful for rabbi Akivah and his followers, for they ‘believed that it is better to limit belief in God’s power than to dampen faith in God’s mercy’ (Heschel 1962, 119). Heschel’s own view was similar to that of rabbi Akivah, assuming that man is completely responsible for the destiny of this world. God is man’s partner, and only if God and man cooperate redemption will come (Heschel 1955, 413). In these words we can note a kind of messianic tone in Heschel but it is not an apocalyptic brand of Messianism according to which God intervenes in this world and changes its orders. The days of the Messiah and the divine Kingdom will only arrive, if man cooperates with God (Even-Chen 2006, 369). Heschel also considered prayer to be an answer to God’s quest for man: ‘Where are thou’ (Genesis 3:9). In his view, Adam was not able to answer this question, but Abraham, the rst prophet, did give an answer: ‘Here I am’ (Genesis 22:1). Concluding Remarks As we have seen before, Heschel emphasizes the idea that revelation is both a revelation of man and a revelation of God. This implies that when man is able to reveal himself, he gets closer to the divine presence so that he is able to hear the voice of God. It is only man’s sensitivity to the presence of God that enables him to answer the divine quest. According to Heschel: A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator . . . To witness the perpetual marvel of the world’s coming into being is to sense the presence of the Giver in the given; it is being aware of the fact that the source of time is eternity and that the secret of being is the presence of eternity within time (Heschel 1951b, 101).

In other words: Heschel argues that time is the process of creation and that renewal and creativity are essential in order to experience the presence of the Creator. God is a living God and not an Aristotelian eternal mind. The surest way to suppress the human ability to communicate with God is indifference to the sublime wonder of existence. For Heschel, it is the root of all sin (Heschel 1955, 43). One of the questions I posed at the beginning of this paper was whether it was possible for man to be seen by God. Heschel’s answer is as follows:

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‘The purpose of prayer is to be brought to God’s attention; it is to be heard and understood by Him. The purpose of prayer is not to know God, but to be known by God’ (Heschel 1954, 10). In sum: God is in exile and He is waiting for the moment at which He can open the doors of this world. When we allow Him to do this, we will be seen by God once more. LITERATURE Even-Chen, A., A Voice from the Darkness —A.J. Heschel Phenomenology and Mysticism (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, 1999. ———, ‘On the Holiness of the People of Israel in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel’, in: M. Poorthuis (ed.), A Holy People, Leiden-Boston, 2006. Heschel, A.J., Man is not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, New York, 1984 (rst edition 1951 = 1951a). ———, The Sabbath, New York, 1997 (rst edition 1951 = 1951b). ———, Man’s Quest for God, Santa Fe, 1996 (rst edition 1954). ———, God in Search of Man, New York, 1983 (rst edition 1955). ———, Heavenly Torah—as refracted through the Generations, New York-London, 2005 (rst edition 1962). ———, ‘Jewish Theology’, in: Sussana Heschel (ed.), Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, New York, 1996 (rst edition 1969). ———, A Passion for Truth, New York, 1974 (rst edition 1973). Kaplan, E.K., Holiness in Words, New York, 1996. ———, Dresner, S.H., Abraham Joshua Heschel—Prophetic Witness, New Haven-London, 1998.

5. OUR IMAGE OF ‘OTHERS’ AND OUR OWN IDENTITY Daniela Müller (Tilburg University) Introduction The Christian search for truth has taken place in a continuous dialectic curve of institutionalization and charismatic structuring, of catholicity and individuality, of the establishment of norms and the infringement of the law, of the axioms of religion preserved and passed on by teachers and of individually found truth through revelation. In each period of time and in each society varying accentuation in the process was important, the result of which was often a violent severance of the two poles: the clergy and charisma. Especially in the eld of essential questions, such as the meaning of life, salvation and the legitimate conveyance of doctrine, it was surely an efcient method to label the representations of other denominations with recurring stereotypes and rhetoric, which make it seem justied to say that an image of the ‘other’ is being created. This process of creating an image of the ‘other’ in the light of a special epoch, the Middle Ages, will be shown later on.1 The Mechanism of Exclusion Adhering to a faith is ultimately being convinced of a truth, which backs away from clear proof. One has to rely on plausibility’s, which are strengthened and justied through the very fact that others also use the same patterns. Rodney Stark has described the social process

1 According to scientic conventions it is customary to x the period of the Middle Ages to roughly 500–1500, the epoch between late Antiquity and modern times. The limits are still under discussion. The best-known alternative is the one by the Belgian professor of historical economics Henri Pirenne, who holds that the Middle Ages begin with the advent of the Islam in the seventh century. Others, like Ernst Troeltsch end the period with the Age of Reason. For the divergent proposals compare e.g. the survey of Markschies, 1995, 16ff. In this treatise the period is mainly restricted to the 11th–14th centuries.

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coupled with religion which took place in the early church.2 He argues that those who refuse to believe in the religion that is hold to be true are a threat to its plausibility. It raises constant doubts whether one’s own religion is the correct one, since so many others do not accept it. The more people are converted to one’s own religion, the more credible it seems to be, whatever its teachings are. This mechanism should be born in mind, when one pursues this line of thought, especially with respect to our image of the ‘other’. The exclusion of the ‘other’ must also expel one’s own doubts and substantiate that one’s own persuasion is the only true one. As in the metaphysical way of thinking purely rational arguments were bound to fail.3 It looked more effective—since antiquity at the latest—to prove the verity of one’s own religion in an indirect way. First, the devotees of other denominations were slandered and their convictions were presented as distortions of the true faith, in order to make the superiority and truth of one’s own faith even more conspicuous. Representation of one sort or another, which was understandable to everybody and needed little or no thinking at all, served the purpose to ‘prove’ one’s own absolutism as being best of all.4 Long before such representation got a visual form—which happened approximately since the eleventh century—literary motives came into being. Generally speaking, material representation was only acquired after lengthy battles during which the iconographic illustration of especially the Divine and the Holy was for a long time not only exposed to criticism from outsiders but also from inner circles within Christianity itself. A link between the opposition to iconography and the exclusion of the ‘other’ can e.g. be found with the anti-representation Paulicians, who were branded as heretics by the Byzantine-Orthodox church in the controversy about iconography (Frank, 2004). But which was the more important: their theological position—the rejection of any repre-

2

Cf. Stark, 1997, especially 7–111. The rise of the Early Church, which may be called a success story, during which many people joined the new religion, was followed by a certain stagnation from the tenth century at the latest, during which the contact of the Christians with the adherents of a younger and more animated religion—the Islam—shook the plausibility of the Christians’ religion. 3 The last few decades the proofs for the existence of God have only survived in theology as historical objectives, cf. Ricken, 1999. 4 These are claims to absolutism which aim both at ‘the absolute’ (in fact God) and were presented in an absolute manner (that is with unrelenting harshness).

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sentation of the Divine—or their militant opposition to the emperors’ claim to hierarchy? The Concept of Christian Universality The process of creating a religious creed by excluding those who contradict one’s own convictions was only possible against the background of the universal claims of Christianity. The Scriptures of the New Testament show how far biblical theology had distanced itself from the conceptions of the Gentiles, which had been dominant in pre-Christian religion. In the Gentiles’ way of thinking, belonging to a particular people was always based on a legend of descent, in the centre of which there was an ancestor. The Romans for example pretended to be the descendants of Aeneas, who ed from the burning town of Troy, and the Goths of Odin, father of gods. Nevertheless, the Bible as well as the Church Fathers replaced the genealogical link by advocating a strict adherence to the dictates of the faith. In Ephesians for instance we read: ‘There is one body and one spirit; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all, and in all.’ (Ephesians 4, 4–6; Schnackenburg, 1982, 160ff.; Gnilka, 1971, 132ff., 200ff.). St. Paul introduces the concept of Adam as the only ancestor of mankind, which concept was the basis of the fundamental unity of the human race. Thus, according to Arnold Angenendt, the concept of Christian universality came into being in history books (Angenendt, 1994, 33). Nonetheless reality quickly overtook this idea: the establishment of early Christian patriarchies and polarizing dogmas led to the formation of independent groups of churches. That is why—as early as the fourth century—the generally accepted ONE faith was brought into question. The idea of a universal faith for all peoples became limited to those living in the Roman Empire. Germanic tribes attacking the Roman Empire could easily be labelled as ‘barbarians’, as this was a current term in the Hellenistic and late Roman antiquity.5 Although considering the well-known passage in Colossians 3,11 ‘There is no question here of Greek and Jude, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian or Scythian’—the antithesis ‘cultural world’-‘barbarian’ should

5 For the anthithesis barbarians-Romans see Goltz, 1994, 31–34. A more thorough study is that by Demandt, 1989. A very precise study on this subject is published by Vogt, 1967.

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actually have been dropped by then—Church Fathers such as Lactantius (Divinae institutiones 1.21) and Ambrose (De ofciis ministrorum 2.71; 2.136; 3,84) used this old contradistinction, but this time applied it to the religious antipoles Catholicism and Arianism. In the early Middle Ages they were then called pagan dogs and ‘untermenschen’, as is proved by the political attitude of bishop Bruns von Querfurt towards the Wends (Kahl, 1955). During the upheavals of the migration of nations the conception of unity of the Western world got lost for some time, but returned with even more force after the tenth century. Angenendt (Angenendt 1994) and Von Padberg (Von Padberg, 1997) mention the decisive inuence of the activities of Anglo Saxon missionaries like Bonifatius and Liudger during this ‘universalizing process’. In their turn they were in their conceptions strongly dependent on Pope Gregory the Great. Thanks to the converging plans of the Carolingian dynasts the concept of the Christian universality was developed and extended. The views of the church leaders and the worldly rulers came together in this process.6 ‘Universal royalty met universal religion’ is a brief description of very complex historical facts. This was the soil on which during the twelfth and thirteenth century the christianitas concept could develop. Nora Berend (Berend, 2001, 42–74) has scrupulously explored the varying meanings of this concept. In this respect it is interesting for our purpose to study the development of a territorial variant, already started amongst the Carolingians (Müller, 2004a), which pointed at the identication of the Western Latin church with the notion of christianitas. Since the eleventh century christianitas came increasingly to mean a cultural, social, political and religious entity, the guarantor of which was the Pope. After the originally far-reaching uniform world view of the early Middle Ages had broken down into a religious and a secular half. The concept of royalty had already lost many elements of its sacred character. These elements were now transferred to the papal system without any problems.7

6 Certainly the recourse by the nobility to genealogy was all the time maintained, as it was their instrument for securing their origin and thus establishing their identity. See for instance Duby, 1999, especially 171–243 or Angenendt, 1994. 7 For details of this complex process, see e.g. Jedin, 1966, 337ff. In his Decretum Gratian indicated this separation quite explicitly: ‘Duo sunt genera christianorum . . . genus clericorum . . . genus laicorum.’ c.12.q.1.c.7.

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The Concept of Christianitas: Gregory VII This christianitas idea was already present during the reign of Gregory VII, whose reformations conferred his name to a whole epoch. Therefore, it is not accidental that at the time when the clergy was institutionally and juridically established, more and more religious opposition parties made their appearance, the adherents of which were directly branded as heretics and unbelievers and were consequently persecuted (Dinzelbacher, 2004, 102f.; Müller, 2004c, 18–31). In several brilliant studies Jean Flori has examined the ideological program of pope Gregory VII in detail; he has especially managed to show out how this pope engaged opponents to support his own universal position of power (Flori, 2005; Flori, 2001). Gregory undoubtedly used the production of images as a means of propaganda to mobilize the ght against the ‘others’. The duality of this strategy and concept is quite clear: he who does not side with the papal reform party—the good side—belonged to the ‘others’, or the evil side: the devil and his associates, the Antichrist and all God’s enemies. It is really striking to see how often the devil is mentioned in Gregory’s writings. Flori has counted 79 cases in which the terms ‘diabolus’, ‘sathanas’ and ‘antiquus hostis’ are alternately used (Flori, 2005, 153). Who then are the followers of the devil? First of all seductive women who entice men to lechery, splurge, concubinage and incestuous marriages (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 124ff.). The connection with Gregory’s reform ideas is evident. He sees women as the morally guilty persons who prevent men from following God’s commandments. The second group of God’s enemies can also directly be connected with Gregory’s aims of reformation: they are those who capture Church property, who steal from church buildings and destroy them. They are to be fought with all available means (modis omnibus), including armed military action (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 408ff.). But the most despicable group consists of the heretics and schismatics. According to Gregory the devil avails himself of bishops, abbots, prelates and priests to thwart his reformation plans. At the same time he argues that the ‘natural sons of the devil’—the heathens—are aiming to annihilate the faithful and conquer the Christian world. In this context Gregory is to be considered the initiator of the crusades, as he even thinks of putting himself in the vanguard of an army to ght against the enemies of Christ (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 69–71; comp. Cowdrey, 1988, 155). In his letters he uses penetrating pictures in order to obtain the aid of

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sovereigns: the faithful in the east are slaughtered like livestock, their throats are cut like those of cattle, day by day (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 75ff.). Moreover, Gregory wanted his ock to consider something else that exactly tted his Western universalistic policy. He asserted that the presence of the Pope in the Near East would save both the faithful from persecution by the heathens and from schism (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 165–168). The Muslims were generally described as heathens. For propaganda reasons they were then accused of the most evil deeds. Therefore, the church was obliged to ght such practices by force of arms. Thus the term milites Christi in its originally pacist meaning referring rst to all the faithful, was then applied to the clergy, especially to monks, and nally, under the inuence of the pope’s writings, to all crusaders, laymen, who fought with weapons in their hands (Flori, 2005, 163ff.). By depicting the opponents as devils Gregory consecrated the battles. Since Paschalis II summoned his followers to a ‘heretics crusade’ against the emperor Heinrich IV in 1102, the popes consistently continued Gregory’s policy by using the militia Christi as an instrument to take punitive steps against those Christians who had been labelled as heretics and were a threat to him. Of such character were not only the crusade against the Albigensians (1209–1229; Oberste, 2003), or the crusade against the Stedinger (about 1234; Köhn, 1979, 15–85), but also the wars of a later period (Housley, 1999) such as the crusades against the Hussites or the crusades against the Turks, right into C18th. All this suggests a more comprehensive meaning of the word crusade, which most modern historians deem appropriate (Riley Smith, 1999, 9–22). This distinction in the crusade concept is undoubtedly formulated by Gregory, for it is striking that the expressions he used with regard to Muslims are innocent compared with those he uses regarding the heretics. The name Antichrist appears very frequently. With Gregory the originally eschatological dimension fails almost completely. He used the word to indicate the ‘top assistant’ of the devil, who implants dogmatic dissension, schism and heresy in Christianity (Flori, 2005). He calls e.g. the in his eyes simoniacal bishops of Lombardy ‘servants of the devil, heroes of the Antichrist, precursors of the Antichrist (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 23ff.) and satellites of the end’ (Registrum Gregorii VII, 1967, 17–19). So he incessantly declared in strong-stressed language that those who ‘oppose our mother, the holy and universal Church’ are often to be recognized as servants of the Antichrist. In Gregory’s opinion they are

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the chief representatives of the enemies of God. Flori has statistically proved that in over 64% of cases the term ‘enemies of God’ refers to the clergy, specically those clergymen who oppose the reform intended by Gregory and their worldly supporters (Flori, 2005, 161). By contrast those who are willing to ght these enemies are raised to the ranks of saints and martyrs. What are heretics? With what violent words the church took action against especially heretics—a ‘heretic’ was since Pope Gregory VII each person who opposed the pope’s commands8—also becomes clear from an informative article by Beverly Kienzle (Kienzle, 2005). She has been exploring the animal metaphors which were applied to heretics since the church fathers. Herbert Grundmann (Grundmann, 1927) has carefully studied the pictures of fox and wolf. Kienzle has continued this research. She made very clear how ‘Ketzer’ (= heretics) became part of the German vocabulary as ‘Katzenanhänger’ (adherents to cats). Incidentally, the cat is just one of the many personications of the devil. It is a well-known fact that we owe the etymologically interesting derivation of the name Cathars, from Latin cattus, to the important early scholastic Alanus ab Insulus.9 In his Summa Quadrapartita directed against Carthars, Waldenses, Muslims and Jews, he tells his contemporary readers the reason why the Cathars were given this name. During their meetings a huge cat appeared, whose anus they then kissed as a token of their submission.10 According to Alanus, the term ‘Cathar’ stems directly from ‘cattus’

8 This becomes very obvious in Dictatus Papae, compare to this: Cowdrey, 1998. For more in-depth research, specically with respect to the juridical background, also see: Flatten, 1963, 29–47. 9 Compare to the etymology of this word the very informative study of the Romanist Kramer (Kramer, 1989). He argues that the German word ‘Ketzer’ derives from the term ‘gazzari’ rst found in the twelfth century, which is a deformation of the name of the Chazzars living in the Crimean. ‚Gazzari‘, however, was the designation in Italian language for the Cathars. In this case the name of a people from the East became a synonym of the adherents of a doctrine that was decisively formed under eastern inuences. Since the eleventh century the East was always ideologically seen as the cradle of heresy in the view of western chroniclers. For more information on this see Müller, 2004a. For more information about the ‘foreign’ roots of divergent religious conceptions and the ght against them, see Müller 2004a. 10 Alanus, in PL 210, 305–430. The rst book directed at the Cathars is to be found on pp. 305–378. At least twenty-two manuscripts have been preserved.

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(= cat), and consequently, the Roman Catholic Church considered all the heterodox people mentioned above to be nothing but adherents of the cat (Moulinier-Brogi, 2004). The Low German word katter/ketter then changed into ketzer, the German synonym of haeriticus. The fatal identication with the devil stems for a large part from the cruelty against animals, and is not restricted to the Middle Ages. Kienzle pointed out that during the time of witch-hunting thousands of cats—as well as women, men and children—were burnt at the stake.11 The identication of women with semi-animals in fables—like the Sirens, who were as a matter of course also created by the devil—was very thrilling indeed (Le Goff-Ladurie, 1971; Lundt, 1991). Originally the Siren was a recurrent motif in the folk-legends. In these legends she is depicted as half woman, half animal surfacing the water and disappearing into it again. Geoffroi d’Auxerre (Super Apocalypsim, 183–191) introduced the Siren in his scholarly treatises. Kienzle made clear that the context in which Geoffroi presented his siren exemplum was of a socio-political scope. He mentioned it explicitly in connection with his ght against heresy and public speeches performed by women.12 Against the unauthorized preaching of Waldensian women the learned monk Geoffroi put the behaviour of the Virgin Mary.13 She spoke little, but often meditated on what she saw and experienced. For women, believing was rst and foremost a matter of the heart; only men authorized by Rome were allowed to preach the faith in public, rationally, didactically and rhetorically (Müller, 2004c, 100–103). In the ght against ‘others’ a great variety of motives was developed, all of which aimed at proving the dangers of the ‘others’ and emphasizing the legitimacy of the ght against the ‘others’. As a consequence of the increasing strengthening of papal authority, the juridical position of those who did not fall under christianitas was xed under Innocent IV (Muldoon, 1979). The ultimate jurisdiction over all people, including

11 For this subject, see the study on folklore of Darnton, 1984 especially chapter 2. According to this author, the extremely dishonourable punishments of animals are to be explained with knowledge of religious distrust of animals. For more information about punishments of animals, see: Sellert, 1984, 6–84. Compare to the relationship between man and animal in general: Dinzelbacher, 2000. 12 As to preaching by females see the eminent and differentiated omnibus collected and edited by B. Kienzle and P.J. Walker, 1998, with corresponding references to further literature. 13 For the argumentation of a contrary view see e.g. the study by Perelman, Olbrechts,Tyteca, 1969, esp. 367ff.

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the unbelievers, fell to the pope, since as the vicarius Christi he was responsible for everybody: due to the Law of Creation each and every individual was subordinate to Christ. This conception explains why since the second half of the thirteenth century Jews could also be treated and punished as heretics by the Inquisition.14 This strategy differed from the ‘classical’ denition of the word ‘heretic’. A ‘classical’ heretic was someone, who had to be christened in order to be able to adhere to a wrong (Christian) religion anyway. Jews were a case for the Inquisition, only when they believed that they could return to their original Jewish religion after enforced baptism. But although enforced christenings were forbidden by church law, they were nonetheless legitimate, and, consequently a return to the old religion brought forth the accusation of heresy. Dehumanizing the Others In this increasingly harsh setting it is not surprising that all those who did not belong to christianitas, in the way the Western Church interpreted the word, became the ‘others’. However, in the ght against the ‘others’ this church created a distinct prole for itself, which was also presented in impressive iconograhics.15 During this process the dehumanization of the ‘other’ was accepted, even striven after. No difference was made between the ‘sons of the devil’, the Jews (Trachtenberg, 1943), the male and female Montanists ( Jensen, 1992) possessed by demons. The Huns were seen as the representatives of Hell (Thompson, 1999), the heretics as the servants of the devil (Patschovsky, 1987), and the witches as the mistresses of Lucifer.16 The humanity of all these people was pushed aside in favour of a, mostly supernatural, descent from evil. Thus the dehumanized opponents become the enemies of the human race. Therefore, ghting them was considered to be an appropriate war in which one’s own worthiness could be proved as well. Moreover, bearing 14

Concerning the enforced baptisms of Judes see e.g. the recent study Haverkamp, 1999, or Singer, Van Engen, 2001. The fact that also the canonical ban on enforced baptisms had no moderating effect against a background of pogroms and acts of violence must have been known to the popes, especially the ones from Avignon is, according to me, overlooked by E.H. Wolf in his moderate assessment of papal policy towards the Jews. See also Wolf, 2004. 15 See to this the pictures in Müller, 2004b. 16 Just a selection from the immense ood of publications on witch-hunting: Lorenz, Bauer, 1995.

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in mind the Christian backgound, the concept of dehumanization was theologically necessary in order to recognize man as the image of God and thereby obtaining knowledge of the Creator. Therefore the opponent’s identication of an image of God had rst to be eradicated in order to be able to overcome him. Consequently, the ‘others’ did not have God as their Creator; they were creatures of evil, and never meant to be created in God’s image.17 The very reason why the written and abusive language referring to the opponents was so effective was that it stemmed from an exegetical tradition that had authorized the use of typology and allegory since Origen (De Lubac, 1993; Daley, 1998). Whereas typology starts from the idea that something that has already taken place in history refers to something else that is likewise historical and real, allegory presumes that beside the literal meaning there is a metaphorical, spiritual meaning present which has to be discovered. Typology is preferably used to establish close links between the Old and the New Testaments; allegorical interpretation, however, takes place in all elds (De Lubac, 1993; Smalley, 1983): behind the wolf the heretic is hidden, who in his turn refers to the devil as his father. Thanks to this allegorical method—especially used by the community of the faithful—those individuals could be detected who are not what they look like but are to be considered the harbingers of the Antichrist. Although written images regarding male and female heretics are in the majority (Müller, 2004b), pictorial images mainly employ images referring to animals. The Dominicans, as the ‘canes domini’ for example hunt wolves in sheep’s clothing, the wolves representing heretics and unbelievers.18 In hell, a wide variety of snakes threaten the Simonites and thus all heretics.19 Monsters devour preachers who have not been authorized by the ofcial church.20 So the dissenters, reecting in allegorical way as it were, the very nature of the ‘others’ fall victim

17 This tactic became especially clear in the time of the conquistadores in South America, when the Indios were denied their humanity by some Christians as they were supposed to have no souls. So it was easier to exploit and ruin them as slaves in the mines. From the multitude of articles on this subject I select Dressendörfer, 1989. 18 A reference to the portrayals in the Dominican church Santa Maria in Florence. 19 Numerous illustrations document the medieval visions of hell; see for example the wall of the altar in Albi Cathedral. Later these representations were adopted by the great Renaissance painters, such as Michelangelo in the Sixtine chapel in Rome. 20 A most impressive example is the Romanic Tympanon in Moissac. On these sculptures a lot has been published in recent years. See for a recent publication above all Droste, München, 1996, or specically with regard to cloisters Cazes-Scèlles, Paris, 2003.

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to their own depravity. The activities of the ‘others’ depicted on the walls of churches, or described in pamphlets distributed amongst the people, or the verbose descriptions in sermons and tracts, all the same ‘prove’ the correctness of their portrayal: Muslims urinating on the altar,21 Jews drinking the blood of children,22 Templars and Cathars kissing anuses,23 and polygamous Anabaptists—they all undermine the divine laws and the values of society based on them. In the deepest sense they are deviant from human nature, as they are strictly speaking at variance with human existence; they are the embodiment of man’s dark sides. Therefore it is especially the pictures of animals that are eminently suitable for the specication of the ‘others’, as nature is understood to be a reservoir of signs which, if correctly interpreted, clarify the divine order. The exclusion of the ‘other’ from human society did not only become legitimate, it was also misinterpreted as clear proof of one’s own axioms by means of an appropriate creation of an image. So the winner triumphing on the battleelds of the crusades and sitting in the judge’s chair was simultaneously the victor in the struggle for truth. For if the ‘others’ were not willing to be converted, they had to be rooted out. In a circular letter to the faithful, Bernhard of Clairvaux drew up his program that was based on these premises. The adherents of other religions on the edge of the Western world were addressed in very emphatic words: ‘God has inspired kings and sovereigns to take revenge on the pagans and to exterminate the enemies of Christendom, . . . to fully eradicate those pagan peoples or convert them irrevocably.’24 Therefore entering into a contract with them is for Bernhard totally unthinkable. Either their religion or they themselves must be rooted

21 This was one of the standard reproaches in the propaganda campaign for the crusades. The propagandistic depictions also prove that the crusades did not at all end with the fall of Akkon in 1291, but that the old pictures of the Jerusalem crusades were afterwards used in order to keep the stereotype of the Muslim enemy alive and to endorse the later wars against the Muslims ideologically. 22 This theme is especially prevalent in the depictions of the presumptive Massacre of the Innocents by Jews, which culminated in the adoration of the child of Simon of Trient. For the subject of ritual killing the excellent treatise see Langmuir, 1972. 23 The pictorial replacement of the caricatured vassal kiss with the bum kiss of heretics is e.g. visible on a well-known miniature in the anti-Waldensian polemical pamphlet by Johannes Tinctor, Tractatus contra sectam valdensim. 24 ‘. . . ad faciendam vindictam in nationibus et exstirpandos de terra cristiani nominis inimicos . . . ad delendas penitus, aut certe convertendas nationes illas’, Bernardus, Epistola 457, in: Sancti Bernardi opera omnia. vol 8. 9ff.

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out.25 Likewise Gratian wrote down in chrystal clear phrasing: ‘Heretics can even be forced to salvation against their will.’26 In his view, only conversion or annihilation of the ‘others’ could prevent endangering Christians’ religious plausability. That is why especially the battle against the Jews was a very bitter one. Their existence as the people from whom the Messiah descended, whom they did not accept as such, was a threat to the Christian claims of truth. If Christianity is supposed to be the fullment of Judaism, wherefore then did the Jews still exist? The allegoric-typological exegesis of the Church Fathers, who had seen the Jews as the forerunners of the Christian truth, had admittedly given them a certain ‘right of existence’. However, it could not camouage the ambivalence of Christian theologians about the Jews being God’s chosen people on the one hand and the traitors of Christ on the other,27 as a look at patristic writings makes clear. In the Middle Ages, as the literal interpretation of the Bible became increasingly dominant, the threat posed by the Jews got more and more real. Within the framework of the Christian conception of christianitas the other could be: the outsider, the unknown person, but also the familiar person who is your rival for the interpretation of the biblical message. To the rst category belonged Muslims, Huns and Mongols, to the second those resistant to reform such as heretics and orthodox Christians. In this context the Jews were, so to speak, borderline cases: they have been known for a long time, living close to Christians. Though apart by rejecting Christ as the Messiah, they pray to the same God. The Jews then were to be endured because they heralded the forthcoming salvation. At the same time they had to be seen as heretics, as they were not willing to be converted by missionaries. Propaganda as self-legitimation Propaganda always aims at self-legitimation and at stabilizing one’s own values as well. These values are, however, never inexibly xed; they must gradually be rediscovered and formed again and again. In order to be able to discredit the ‘other’ in the most despicable way, you must 25

Ibid. ‘. . . donec, auxiliante Deo, aut ritus ipse, aut natio deleatur.’ ‘haeretici ad salutem etiam inuiti sunt trahendi’, c.23, q.4, 38. 27 This was much more the case because the typological exegesis always chiey referred to eschatology, when problems related to contacts with the, so to speak, really existing Jews arose. 26

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rst construct these values and let them be the basis of your action; subsequently these values are said to be perverted by the ‘other’. It is remarkable that in this process a shift took place of the theological dispute to a moral level. Extreme intellectualism was being replaced by moral values in order to provide the ‘proof ’ of the rightness of one’s own conviction. Behaviour shows to which camp one belongs. For example, if cunning and craftiness are the attributes of the heretics, the Christian merchant should beware of availing himself of these; when bumsuckers are generally seen as sodomites, and so qualied as homosexuals, it must be clear to all why there is no room for homosexuals in Christian society. Additionally, Herbert Grundmann (Grundmann, 1927) has argued that through the depiction of the heretics’ debauchery, fantasy offered a means of compensation for the repression of sensuality which went hand in hand with the increasing moralization of Christian society. Now it was possible to imagine the devil penetrating a woman from the front and from behind, or to fantasize about naked women rumbustiously dancing around a re and soldiers allowing their asses to be kissed. To imagine all this was now permitted, even compulsory, in order to recognize the opponent’s viciousness and at the same time to ensure one’s own moral superiority. At the same time, this was the reason why the descriptions and pictorial representations contrary to those of hell remained remarkably dull and sterile. The saint was presented as the icon of the divine, and found therefore, its dialectic equivalent in the ‘other’, who seemed to deny divine transcendence. The constructed counterpart of the saint was the evil-doer. He appeared to be the more dangerous when in him the invisibility of his true nature coincided with the visibility of human condition. Therefore, it was thought that his activities reected his disposition. Moral disqualication was used as a description or sign of his true mentality, so that the res and signum of the symbols could be brought into line. However, the price to be paid for this process of demonizing the others was high. The invented images called up fears, especially when they were supported by real events for which no scientic explanation could be found, such as climate changes resulting in crop failures and epidemics. These fears became increasingly threatening and in their turn they called forth new images.28 These augmented fears became evident

28

See for these occurences Dinzelbacher, 1996.

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during the twelfth and thirteenth century both in literature and the ne arts. The motifs linked with these fears were at rst widespread only in monastic communities. Then, since Gregory VII, laymen became more and more involved in this imaginative, fearful world of demons and hell. Think for instance of the threatening message which was invariably located over the west porches of churches (Baschet, 1993, 135ff.), where the Last Judgement as iconic theme was dominant. It graphically presented the most frightening and gruesome scenes in hell together with sadistic fantasies. Whereas in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages the pictures that aroused these fears were accessible only to a small circle of scholars who mastered the art of reading, now sculptural art decisively made them common knowledge amongst all believers, until nally, in the age of printing, all sorts of leaets spread the most dreadful aspects of witchcraft among the people. As a result the production of prints rose massively, for now the ght against the ‘others’ was no longer an issue for the learned clergy but for all Christians (Müller, 2004b). The mediaeval fears ultimately culminated in the very well-known conspiracy theories, as a consequence of which for example Jews, Muslims and lepers were seen as entering into a coalition in order to demoralize the Christian Occident.29 By about 1215 the literary and pictorial representation of the ‘other’ was no longer sufcient. Mentality and belief—it was actually only these two that mattered—were not longer physically perceptible. Moreover, as the fear increased that beside the clearly noticeable ‘others’ like strangers or people of different racial origin, there were increasingly more ‘others’ living in their own ranks, the need to mark those who were otherwise barely distinguishable became imperative. This was the moment for the Lateran Council to decree for the universal church that synchronously heretics, Jews and lepers should be dressed uniformly to make each group identiable.

29 The link between Judes and Iepers is almost as old as Christianity, if not older. For example, already in the rst century after Christ the Egyptian Maneton was contested by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his apologetic essay Conta Apionem (= against Apion I, 26ff.). The former had maintained that among the ancestors of the Jews there was also a group of expelled lepers with a plain anti-Jewish vocabulary. Josephus’s polemical treatise spread in Europe during the Middle Ages. The actually refuted imputations were now combined with existing myths that had in fact also been disproved by Josephus. Both contributed to hostility toward Jews. Examples are for instance the stories about ritual killings or the adoration of an ass. For the alleged conspiracy see Barber, 1981, 1–17 or Ginzburg, 1990, rst part, 39–67.

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The painted or written image of the ‘other’ has now turned into the ‘other’ himself. Concluding Remarks Proof of God’s existence which previously could not be represented in solid form now seemed to be possible on the supercial level of depictions. That is why the making of such pictures of he others was both self-assuring and self-identiable. Therefore, too, the religious and social levels were in this case not separable: they were mutually related to each other. To recognize this inextricably interwoven network may be the rst step to break free from the dire consequences of these particular portrayals of the other. LITERATURE Primary Literature Registrum Gregors VII. Epistolae selectae, II. Ed. E. Caspar, Berlin, 1967 (MGh 3). Bernardus, Epistola 457, in: Sancti Bernardi opera omnia. Ed. J. Leclercq, C.H. Talbot, H.-M. Rochais, Roma, 1957–1974. 8 vols. Vol. 8, 9ff. Secondary Literature Angenendt, A., ‘Der eine Adam und die vielen Stammväter. Idee und Wirklichkeit der Origo gentis im Mittelalter’, in: P. Wunderli (ed.), Herkunft und Ursprung. Historische und mythische Formen der Legitimation, Sigmaringen, 1994, 27–52 (= Akten des Gerda Henkel Kolloquiums Düsseldorf 1991). Barber, M., ‘The Plot to Overthrow Christendom in 1321’, in: History, Bd. 66, Nr. 216, 1981, 1–17. Baschet, J., Les justices de l’au-delà. Les représentations de l’enfer en France et en Italie (XII e–XV e siècle), Rom, 1993. Berend, N., At the Gate of Christendom. Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in Medieval Hungary, Cambridge, 2001. Cazes, Q./Scellès, M., Les chapiteaux du cloître de Moissac: questions d’iconographie et du syle, L’art du Sud, de la création à l’identité (XI e–XX e siècle), Paris, 2003. Cowdrey, H.E.J., ‘The Gregorian Papacy, Byzantium and the First Crusade’, in: Howard-Johnston, J.D. (ed.), Byzantium and the West, c. 850–1200, Amsterdam, 1988, 146–169. ———, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085, Oxford, 1998. Daley, B., ‘Origen’s De principiis. A Guide to Principles of Christian Scriptural Interpretation, in: J. Petruccione (ed.), Nova et vetera, Washington D.C., 1998, 3–21. Darnton, R., The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York, 1984. Demandt, A., Die Spätantike. Römische Geschichte von Diocletian bis Justinian, München, 1989. Dinzelbacher, P., (ed.), Mensch und Tier in der Geschichte Europas, Stuttgart 2000.

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———, ‘Die Achsenzeit des Hohen Mittelalters’, in: G. Frank, Fr. Niewöhner (eds.), Reformer als Ketzer. Heterodoxe Bewegungen von Vorreformatoren, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2004, 91–123 (= Melanchthon-Schriften der Stadt Bretten 8). ———, Angst im Mittelalter. Teufels-, Todes- und Gotteserfahrung. Mentalitätsgeschichte und Ikonographie, Paderborn, 1996. Dressendörfer, P., ‘Rodando la pietra de Sísifo: Solicitantes ante la Inquisicíon en Indias’, in: Heydenreich, T./Blumenthal, P., Glaubensprozesse—Prozesse des Glaubens? Religiöse Minderheiten zwischen Toleranz und Inquisition, Tübingen 1989, 96ff. Droste, Th., Die Skulpturen von Moissac. Gestalt und Funktion romanischer Bauplastik, München, 1996. Duby, G., Frauen im 12. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt a.M., 1999 [transl.]. Flatten, Der Häresieverdacht im Codex Iuris Canonici, Amsterdam, 1963. Flori, J., ‘Comment diaboliser l’adversaire? La lutte contre les ‘ennemis du Christ’ dans la correspondance de Gregoire VII’, in: A. Brenon, Chr. Dieulafait (eds.), Les Cathares devant l’histoire. Mélanges offerts à Jean Duvernoy, Cahors, 2005, 151–166. ———, La guerre sainte. La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’occident chrétien, Paris, 2001. Frank, G., Wirklichkeit und Topik des sogenannten Vorreformatorischen. Der Paulikianismus, in: G. Frank, Fr. Niewöhner, (eds.), Reformer als Ketzer, Stuttgart, 2004, 57–73. Ginzburg, C., Hexensabbat, Berlin 1990 (German edition), part I, 39–67. Gnilka, J., Der Epheserbrief, Freiburg, 1971 (= Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 10/2). Le Goff, J./Le Roy Ladurie, E., ‘Mélusine maternelle et défricheuse’, in: Annales ESC 1971, 587–622. Goltz, A., ‘Barbarenbilder im Imperium Romanum’, in: Fremde. Zum Umgang mit Fremden in der Geschichte und Gegenwart, Berlin, 1994. Grundmann, H., ‘Der Typus des Ketzers in mittelalterlicher Anschauung’, in: Kultur- und Universalgeschichte. Walter Goetz zu seinem 60.sten Geburtstag 1927, 91–100, reprint in: H. Grundmann, Ausgewählte Aufsätze, vol. 1, Frankfurt, 1976, 313–327. Haverkamp, A. (ed.), Juden und Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge (= Vorträge un Forschungen Bd. XLVII), Sigmaringen, 1999. Housley, N., ‘Die Kreuzzugsbewegung 1274–1700, in: J. Riley-Smith (ed.), Illustrierte Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, Frankfurt a.M.-New York, 1999, 299–338 [= Oxford Illustrated History. German edition]. Jedin, H., Kirche des Glaubens, Kirche der Geschichte. Vol. 1, Freiburg, 1966. Jensen, A., Gottes selbstbewusste Töchter. Frauenemanzipation im Frühen Christentum, Freiburg, 1992. Kahl, H.-D., ‘Compellere intrare. Die Wendenpolitik Bruns von Querfurt im Lichte hochmittelalterlichen Missions- und Völkerrechts’, in: Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 4 (1955), 161–193, 360–401 [repr. in: H. Beumann (ed.), Heidenmission und Kreuzzugsgedanke in der deutschen Ostpolitik des Mittelalters, Darmstadt, 1963, 177–274 [= Wege der Forschung 7]. Kienzle, B.M., Walker, P.J., (eds.), Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millenia of Christianity, Berkeley, 1998. ———, ‘La Représentation de l’Hérétique par L’Imagerie Animale’, in A. Brenon, Chr. Dieulafait (eds.), Les Cathares devant L’Histoire. Mélanges offerts à J. Duvernoy, Cahors, 2005, 181–197. Köhn, R., ‘Die Verketzerung der Stedinger durch die Bremer Fastensynode’, in Bremisches Jahrbuch 57 (1979), 324–339. Kramer, J., ‘Häretiker und Ketzer. Eine Begriffs- und Wortgeschichte’, in: T. Heydenreich, P. Blumenthal (eds.), Glaubensprozesse—Prozesse des Glaubens? Religiöse Minderheiten zwischen Toleranz und Inquisition, Tübingen, 1989, 1–17. Langmuir, G.I., ‘The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln’, in Speculum 47 (1972), 459–482.

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Lorenz, S./Bauer, D.R., Hexenverfolgung (= Quellen und Forschungen zur europäischen Ethnologie Bd. XV), Würzburg, 1995. Lubac, H., Exégèse Médiévale, les quatre sens de L’Ecriture, Clamecy, 1993 [repr.]. Lundt, B., Melusine und Merlin im Mittelalter. Entwürfe und Modelle weiblicher Existenz im Beziehungs-Diskurs der Geschlechter. Ein Beitrag zur Historischen Erzählforschung, Bochum, 1991. Markschies, Chr., Arbeitsbuch Kirchengeschichte, Tübingen, 1995. Moulinier-Brogi, L., ‘Le chat des cathares de Mayence et autres “primeurs” d’un exorcisme du XIIe siècle’, in: Retour aux sources. Textes, études et documents d’histoire médiévale offerts à M. Parisse, Paris, 2004, 699–709. Müller, D., ‘Ketzerinnen’—Frauen gehen ihren eigenen Weg. Vom Leben und Sterben der Katharerinnen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2004 (= Müller, 2004c). ———, ‘Ketzer und Ketzerinnen’. Über die ‘fremde’ Wurzel abweichender Glaubensvorstellungen und ihrer Bekämpfung, in: Ch. Lüth/R.W. Keck/E. Wiersing (eds.), Der Umgang mit dem Fremden in der Vormoderne (Köln/Weimar 1997) 211–228. ———, ‘Der Streit um das Filioque als Prolierungsmoment der westlichen Kirche’, in: J. Bründl, O. Meuffels (eds.), Grenzgänge der Theologie. Festschrift für A. Ganoczy (Münster 2004), 37–59 [= Müller, 2004a]. ———, De dienaren van Satan Rede uitgesproken voor de opening van het academisch jaar in 2004 (Utrecht 2004) [= Müller, 2004b]. Muldoon, J., Popes, Lawyers and Indels, Berkeley, 1979. Oberste, J., Der ‘Kreuzzug’ gegen die Albigenser. Ketzerei und Machtpolitik im Mittelalter, Darmstadt, 2003. Padberg von, L., Unus populus ex diversis gentibus. Gentilismus und Einheit im früheren Mittelalter, in: Ch. Lüth, R. Keck, E. Wiersing (eds.), Der Umgang mit dem Fremden in der Vormoderne. Studien zur Akkulturation in bildungshistorischer Sicht, Köln-WeimarWien, 1997, 155–193. Patschovsky, A., ‘Was sind Ketzer?’, in: M. Kerner (ed.), Eine nstere und fast unglaubliche Geschichte?, Stuttgart, 1987, 169–190. Perelman, C./Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., The New Rhetoric: a Treatise on Argumentation, NotreDame, Ind. 1969. Ricken, Fr., Klassische Gottesbeweise in der Sicht der gegenwärtigen Logik und Wissenschaft, München, 1999. Riley Smith, J., ‘Die Kreuzzugsbewegung und die Historiker’, in: J. Riley-Smith, (ed.), Illustrierte Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, Frankfurt a.M.-New York, 1999, 5–42 [= Oxford Illustrated History, German edition]. Schnackenburg, R., Der Brief an die Epheser, Zürich-Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1982 (EvangelischKatholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 10). Sellert, W., Das Tier in der abendländischen Rechtsauffassung, Hannover, 1984 [= Studium generale, Vorträge zum Thema Mensch und Tier. Tierärztliche Hochschule]. Singer, M./Van Engen, J. (eds.), Jews and Christians in the Twelfth-Century Europe, Notre Dame 2001. Smalley, B., The Study of the Bible, Oxford, 1983. Stark, R., Der Aufstieg des Christentums. Neue Erkenntnisse aus soziologischer Sicht, Weinheim, 1997 [transl.]. Thompson, E.A., The Huns, London, 1999. Trachtenberg, J., The Devil and the Jews. The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its relation to Modern Antisemitism, New Haven, 1943 [repr. Philadelphia 1983]. Vogt, J., Kulturwelt und Barbaren. Zum Menschenbild der spätantiken Gesellschaft, Mainz, 1967 (= Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur. Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Klasse 1). Wolf, H., „Lasst uns beten für die treulosen Juden.“ Neues zum Thema Katholische Kirche und Antisemitismus aus den Vatikanischen Archiven. [ Festvortrag anlässlich der Verleihung des Communicator-Preises am 30.9.2004].

6. IDOLATRY AND THE MIRROR: ICONOCLASM AS A PREREQUISITE FOR INTERHUMAN RELATIONS Marcel Poorthuis (University of Tilburg) Introduction: The other as a Mirror-Image of Myself and the Other as Other Philosophy lives from experience. Phenomenology teaches us to reect upon living experience, “zurück zu den Sachen”, rather than to indulge in abstract speculation. That is why I want to start with such an experience, in order to clarify the interhuman relationship. As a father I had several times the opportunity to carry a baby on my arm. In front of the mirror the young child becomes intrigued by what he or she sees in the mirror. However, the fascinating thing is that at rst the child is looking at my image in the mirror and then it looks at me in real life and then back to the mirror, as if it is puzzled by the image in the mirror. The child more or less ignores his or her own image. What does the little child think: my father next to me has simultaneously hidden himself in the mirror? Sometimes the child smiles when turning from the reection in the mirror to her father in real life, noticing the similarity. From the age of about one year, a child begins to gaze at its own reection as well, realizing that its own waving and smiling can be seen in the mirror. Before that age, however, the child apparently does not make the connection between its inner experience and its mirror image. Now it is for psychologists to investigate these matters further and to provide a more solid basis by experimenting with many different children of various ages and cultures. What interests me, however, is the underlying evidence that a young child recognizes the other person before it recognizes him or herself. The general assumption that a person rst discovers himself and from that basis on starts to explore the world and to relate to other human beings is apparently not selfevident. Although psychological human development does not imply any ontological priority, still it is signicant that a child recognizes the face of the other before it recognizes its own face. The founder of the phenomenological method, Edmund Husserl, claims that we understand

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other human beings by a double perception. I perceive myself ‘from inside’. I experience the other ‘from outside’. By combining the two, I realize that the other is a human being just like me, an ‘alter ego’ so to speak, a re-edition of myself. Hearing someone crying, I compare that with what I know from my inner experience and deduce that the same sad feeling must have befallen the other person. By this double experience I am able to identify myself with the other.1 The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas doubts whether this double experience constitutes the genuine way to relate to the other. In fact, in this double experience, the other appears as a re-edition of myself.2 As a human being, I realize that the other has the same feelings as I have, and I conclude that the other must be a human being like myself. This experience is comparable to the way I see myself in a mirror. I make gestures ‘from the inside’, and I note the effects ‘from the outside’ and identify the two experiences as belonging to one and the same person. But when applying this mirror-experience to the encounter with the other, I myself remain the yardstick and the criterion to measure the other and by recognizing him or her, I reduce him to a ‘double’ of myself. To put it differently, the other is the mirror image of myself and I am able to recognize myself in the other. But what if the primary experience of the other is not that he is ‘like me’, but that he is ‘otherwise’? What if his appeal to me is not mediated by a double analogy, but is more direct, as if his face ‘speaks’ to me even before words are spoken? Of course the notion of belonging to the same human race should not be denied, constituting as it does the foundation of the equality of all men. The question is, however, whether this constitutes the genuine and original experience of the other. Perhaps by stating the commonality between me and the other,—the other as mirror-image of myself—, I am already suppressing the experience of otherness. Even calling the face of the other a human face, may already constitute a commonality which detracts from the experience of otherness. Or to put it differently: the word ‘human’ does not primarily refer to the experience of commonality between me and all others, but might be an experience I discover in the face of the other before I discover it in reecting upon myself.

1 E. Husserl, Carthesianische Meditationen (Husserliana I) Den Haag, 1950, § 50 calls the other an ‘alter ego’. 2 See: Duyndam, Poorthuis, 2003. See also a.o. Darwin, Lacan.

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The experience of the other as other does not contain any elements belonging to my world, then. In a way, he is not ‘from this world’, but enters as it were, as a stranger into my world. Far from being merely my mirror-image, he constitutes an otherness as well, an otherness that remains ‘other’, no matter how often I have seen him and regardless the familiarity with which I encounter him. It concerns an otherness that is not an initial strangeness to be solved by further acquaintance, but an otherness that cannot be reduced to knowledge or recognition.3 Levinas does not hesitate to introduce the word ‘transcendent’ to describe the ‘experience’ or rather the ‘revelation’ of the face of the other. Meeting the other constitutes something like a revelation, seeing his face not as a phenomenon, but as an experience that cannot be grasped nor objectied as a theme for my thought. Meeting the other means approaching the divine, as if the other is in a way closer to the divine than I myself am. The face of the other is transcendent. This paper will delve into the Biblical roots of the prohibition of idolatry (2), to be followed by a discussion of the concept of holiness as applied to man (3). How can this concept be distinguished form idolatry as such? The idea of an asymmetry between myself and the other leads us to ethical consequences (4). Denying that asymmetry, as an egalitarian philosophy does, might in itself be compromised by idolatry (5). In conclusion, we point to some of the consequences of our argument for religion (6) and art (7). The Biblical Concept of Idolatry In what way can we relate this priority of the experience of the other as other to our theme of idolatry and of iconoclasm? Should we not acknowledge that the Biblical prohibition of idolatry as it is phrased in the rst of the Ten Commandments, is a strictly religious concept, that reveals next to nothing about interhuman relationships? Idolatry in the Biblical sense contains according to the Decalogue (Ex. 20:3 vv.) several different layers. Not only is it forbidden “to have other

3

Whether this ‘revelation’ of the face of the other can still be described from a strictly phenomenological perspective is a matter of debate. See: Welten, 2005, 60–73.

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gods besides Me” (1), but a carved4 image is forbidden as well (2) as is any likeness of living beings in the air, on earth or in the water (3). From other injunctions we know that not only man made images are forbidden but worshipping stones or planted trees as well (Lev. 26:1; Deut. 16:21, the Ashera). Even sun, moon and stars can serve as idols and are included in the warning against idolatry (Deut. 4:19). The prohibition of idolatry includes both the connotation of ‘living beings’ that should not be copied, any man made object and any natural element. What strikes from the outset is the broadness of the Biblical prohibition. It does not only concern creating an image of man that is prohibited but the image of any living being as well. An anthropocentric explanation of idolatry as worshipping an anthropomorphic image of God being forbidden because man himself has been created in the image and likeness of God, can only partially explain the Biblical prohibition.5 Apparently, living beings have the potential to exude numinosity, be it idolatrous. Or it might be explained along the lines of convention: those images are prohibited that are used by surrounding cultures as holy images. Still one might think of man externalizing and alienating himself into ‘the work of his hands, by a kind of projection. Although he is himself the image of God, he externalizes this dignity in wood, silver and gold and degrades himself by bowing before it. In this sense all man made images would contain an element of the image of man himself, even when they concern images of other living beings like animals. Man thinks he fashions a deiform image but in reality he creates an anthropomorphic image and by worshiping it he degrades himself as a human being. This element of alienation is strongly emphasized by prophetic (Is. 2:8) and psalmist diatribes against idolatry. Psalm 115:4–8 puts it very strongly: Those who fashion them, all who trust in them, shall become like them.

4 ‘Carved’ is sometimes interpreted as a relief or as a three dimensional statue. But note that the next phrase forbids any likeness of a living being. 5 Still this anthropological ‘turn’ is important in Jewish and Christian conceptions of idolatry, as I have demonstrated in: Poorthuis, 2003.

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This anthropocentric explanation of idolatry has certainly a strong appeal. However, it does not account for the whole range of idolatry. It is not only anthropomorphic images that are forbidden, and not even only man-made statues that are forbidden. The planting of trees and the erection of stones to worship them is forbidden as well. Even here it might still be possible to discern an anthropocentric element, as it is man who with his own hands plants the trees and erects the stones. But what about the sun, the moon and the stars? Clearly no human hands have fashioned any of them. Apparently, all of the cosmos is included in the prohibition of idolatry, not only things made by human hands. Although the Bible itself contains no further rational inquiry into the essence of idolatry, one may assume that the Bible implicitly condemns the attitude of man towards these objects, not the objects itself. Sun, moon and stars may even be admired as God’s creations (Psalm 8,4) and awe and wonder are apt reactions to these amazing constellations. Although the Bible does not delve into psychological and philosophical deliberations to clarify the prohibition of idolatry (as Jewish and Christian sources form the rst centuries C.E. do), we may assume that it is basically the attitude of man which constitutes the criterion whether he commits idolatry or not.6 Still, the fact that several idolatrous objects are specied—images of living beings made by man, holy trees planted by man, holy stones erected by man—warns us not to decide for a totally inward experience as the only criterion for idolatry. What strikes us is that in this prohibition of idolatry there is no reference at all to inter-human relationship as an important issue. The Biblical concept of idolatry seems to focus much more upon the cultic than upon the ethical dimension. Here the Biblical message may be contrasted with the Rabbinical explanation that legitimizes the condemnation of idolatry by pointing to moral depravities that are supposed to accompany it. Thus, the generation of the Tower did not only “make a name” (which is explained as idolatry: Genesis Rabba 38, 7 and 8), but acted wickedly, as did the generation of the Flood (Genesis Rabba 31,6). The Rabbis consider idolatry as the root of all depravity. Hence, to abandon idolatry is tantamount to obeying all of the commandments, as a bold statement has it (Babylonian Talmud Megilla 13a). 6 The Rabban Gamliel’s answer to a philosopher who argued that if God were almighty, He should destroy all idols: ‘You worship sun, moon, stars, planets, mountains en hills, springs and glens and even human beings. Shall he destroy His world because of fools?’ (Mechilta Bahodesh § 6).

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Still, on closer scrutiny, the Decalogue itself (and not just the Rabbinic hermeneutics of it) may be read as a charter of inter-human relations as well: several commandments refer to inter-human prohibitions and obligations: not to steal, not to kill, to honor your parents, and so on. The connection between the religious prohibition of idolatry and the inter-human relationship is, however, more intrinsic. The opening phrase of the Decalogue: “I am the Lord who has lead you out of the house of bondage of Egypt” (Ex. 20.1), conveys already the liberation from any human oppression. The consequence: “You shall have no other gods before Me”, is connected to that liberation; a liberation not only from physical oppression but from idolatry as well. The prohibitions in the book of Leviticus concerning inter-human relations are followed by the solemn statement: “I am the Lord” (e.g. Lev. 19:16), as if God Himself is supervising the observation of these prohibitions. Thus far, we have seen that the prohibition of idolatry refers to the attitude of man rather than to something intrinsic in the object, and we have established a link between the liberation from idolatry and oppression, and the prohibition of idolatry.7 By connecting the prohibition of idolatry to the account of the creation of man, we establish an even more intrinsic relation between both. As a matter of fact, the Bible speaks of human beings as the only living beings being created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1, 27). The Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel has pointed out that the Hebrew words ‘tselem’ and ‘demut’ carry the connotation of idolatrous statues. Hence, in a paradoxical way, the human being created in the image and likeness of God, seems to constitute the only permissible way to represent God (Heschel, 1975). We may conclude by stating that because man is created in the image of God, no other image of God is allowed, whether it be an anthropomorphic portrait or otherwise. Neither does it make any difference whether it is an artifact or an existing object, whether it is lifeless or existing in nature, whether it is an image of a living creature, or a lifeless stone, whether it is something in nature or a celestial body.

7

See for a further elaboration of this idea: Poorthuis, 2003.

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Man’s Holiness: Source of Idolatry or Source of Revelation? Here, however, we remain stuck with the following puzzle. Attributing holiness or divine authority to a human being ostensibly brings us close to idolatry. The Roman emperor demanding divine reverence for his person and for his statues, constitutes the living experience of idolatry in the history of both the early Christians and the Jews of the rst centuries C.E. Clearly, it is not the reverence for statues as such which is at stake here. Should we say then that paying homage to dead statues does injustice to the living human being who, according to monotheistic religions, is the image of God? But even paying homage to a living emperor constitutes idolatry. The emperor not only demands reverence for his statues but for his person as well. Nor should we argue that the emperor made the mistake to usurp the reverence due to all men for his person only. This would imply that from the moment on that all human beings would be treated as the emperor, this would no longer be idolatry. The question can be put in other ways as well: how could the early Christians reject all forms of divine authority of the Emperor as idolatrous and at the same time pay homage to Christ as Son of God? Is this a mere shift of authority from the Emperor to Christ, without an intrinsic difference of authority? Are the Jewish opponents from the Talmudic period right in arguing that Christian belief as such constitutes idolatry by elevating a human being to the rank of a divinity? Following the philosophy of Levinas, however, the question comes back at the heart of Jewish thought itself. How should we distinguish idolatry as deication of man from the attempt of Levinas to describe the encounter with the other as transcendent? Heschel—at least in our condensed rendering of his thought—does not solve this problem as he connects the sacred image of God to all human beings without qualication. The Religious Authority of the Other Let us now return to the question posed earlier: if idolatry of any kind is forbidden, because only God himself is the source and authority of divine power, in what way man can be the source of transcendence, according to Levinas? And in what way, this claim of the experience of transcendence in the encounter with the other can be distinguished

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from equally divine presumptions by emperors of all sorts, constituting the culmination of idolatry? Still we might follow the train of thought as sketched by Levinas by assuming that the transcendent experience of the face of the Other constitutes as it were the antipode of idolatry, whereas denying that transcendence might bring us close to idolatry. To assess the signicance of idolatry in the strictly philosophical approach of Levinas, we resume the analysis of the inter-human relationship. When I assume that the other person is in all respects someone like me, the mirror-image of myself, so to speak, then I cannot claim to detect something fundamental in the other that is not is essence present in myself as well. Experiencing the other as revealing something of the transcendent, irreducible to a phenomenon that presents itself to my conscience, reveals something I do not possess from the outset. Perceiving the other as a phenomenon means to reduce him to what he has in common with or in contrast with other human beings, the color of his eyes, his psychological traits, his biography. However, in a way this does not constitute the other as other. When encountering the other, his face as it were pierces through the phenomenological appearance to constitute an ‘experience’ that transcends my consciousness of that experience. To put it in concrete terms, the other summons me to a responsibility that increases the more I take that responsibility upon me. This experience of transcendence breaking through the phenomenological appearance of the other, is the philosophical expression of iconoclasm. The face of the other constitutes the antipode of the idol, its revelation smashes all delusions and enchanting rhythms, all glamor of rhetorical devices, in favor of an absolute honesty and directness. Still the other as a phenomenon should not be rejected, for science, language, observation and comparison are legitimate ways of approaching my fellow human beings. I am not with the other person alone in the world. The other person has his others, third and fourth person, whom I do not encounter directly face to face. The other belongs to that collectivity as well and in that sense he can be approached and experienced as a phenomenon. In the other I experience the third person, the member of the human species. The absent third is present in the other, just like in the third person the absent other announces his arrival. I should acknowledge that in the third, as a member of the human species, the potential other is present as well. Hence the direct encounter with the other is not effaced or abolished by the presence of

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the collectivity of mankind to which not only the other but all others belong, including myself. Describing me and the other as members of a shared humanity, as it were from the outside, means stepping outside of myself and describing the other and myself as similar phenomena, in a bird’s eye view. I myself and the other are editions of the same species then. In that perspective, the prohibition of idolatry on behalf of man being created in the image of God, constitutes a dignity that is common to myself and the others. This dignity or this divine authority is something that I possess and that I can use to my advantage. However, using divine authority to one’s own advantage seems to be an apt description of idolatry! Here the asymmetry becomes an indispensable tool to establish the true nature of the prohibition of idolatry in the philosophical perspective of Levinas. The experience of revelation in the face of the other is not something I can claim for myself as well. Here, the notion of not knowing gets a positive sense and should not be regarded as a preliminary state to be followed by full knowledge. I do not know that my own face has the impact of a revelation upon the other. The moment I claim the revelation of my face as a prerogative and as a means of wielding authority over the other in front of me, that moment constitutes idolatry. This becomes clear when we turn to the ethical consequences of that asymmetrical relationship. Asymmetry and Ethics Ethics as the description of what we should do, concerns all men. However, ethics knows of a certain depth structure that cannot be broadened to include each individual. For example, if a group of people is besieged by the enemy who demands one of them to be delivered, it is not ethically indifferent whether I present myself or point to someone else. The Sermon of the Mount contains quite a few of those ethical appeals that cannot be generalized. For example, if I am exhorted to discover rst the beam in my own eye before perceiving the splinter in the eye of the other, I may not conclude that for the other person, the same holds true, because then I would have been right to see the beam in his eye! Likewise, I do not have the right to demand from the other

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to turn his other cheek when slapped. Apparently, this appeal is valid for me, but becomes perverted when turned into a general exhortation. If we would not understand the sermon of the Mount from this asymmetrical perspective, it might easily turn into a secret egoism: it is a good thing for me to preach to my neighbor pacism and love of the other! This criticism of Christianity, (in which we may detect some Nietzschean avor) can be countered by assuming the asymmetrical element in these ethics, that cannot be made universal. First, the authority that comes from the face of the other is not something he can use or even experience himself. Only I myself am able to detect transcendence in the face of the other, whereas the other is not able to see his own face. The transcendence, majesty and sanctity that constitutes the experience of the other leads to a sense of inviolability, not in the physical but in the moral sense. Does this hold good vice versa as well? The other sees my face as the face of the other and discerns the transcendence of the face as well. In a religious perspective, he may be aware of me being closer to God that he himself. Approaching God means comforting the other. However, this holds good only for him, not for me. The commandment to feed the hungry has not the same ethical impact and hence is not fullled when I feed myself, even when I am hungry. The other is the hungry, the sick, the widow and the orphan. The experience of awe and of an ethical commandment in the face of the other cannot be appropriated by me. I cannot derive any prerogative from his experience and am not entitled to any claim of religious authority. This asymmetry of the inter-human relationship constitutes the essence of the philosophy of Levinas and is based upon the fundamental difference between me and the other. The conceptual level of humankind, to which both I and the other belong as human beings, obscures precisely this fact: the fundamental difference between me and the other, which cannot be experienced from outside, ‘objectively’, in a birds-eye view, but only from the inside, by me, in a rst-person-perspective. The transcendence of the other which I experience confronting his face, conveys majesty, inviolability and holiness, but cannot be absorbed as a theme of consciousness, as a phenomenon. In other words, I cannot assume the authority that the other experiences in encountering me. That glory is so to speak inaccessible to me. I do not know the shining of my face, like Moses who did not realize that his face shone when he descended from the mountain carrying the Ten Commandments in his hands. This ‘not

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knowing’ points to the asymmetrical relationship between me and the other which is in itself a prerequisite for transcendence. To sacrice myself, which seems to be the ultimate consequence of Levinas’ philosophy (at least if the other would be really helped by that), cannot be transformed into a religious ideology to be put on the shoulders of others. Quite often, this sacricial attitude becomes an instrument in the hands of those wielding power, to enslave a group (quite often women) under a religious oppressive system. Here we may detect the transformation of asymmetrical responsibility into an abuse of power by appropriating what is only accessible to the other: innite responsibility. No doubt here the philosophy of Levinas approaches the limits of what can be expressed in universally shared terms. Still the highly individual experience of what it means to be a subject, even before I include myself as a member of humanity, cannot be excluded from a philosophical reection aiming at a fundamental philosophy of the subject. To put it in the terms of Levinas: The God who passes is not the model of which the face would be an image. To be in the image of God does not mean to be an icon of God but to nd oneself in his trace. The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality maintains all the innity of his absence, which is in the personal ‘order’ himself. He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. To go toward him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the others who are in his trace.8

Approaching the other means following God’s trace. However, my own face is not for myself God’s trace! Seeing myself in the mirror has a tinge of idolatry, precisely because I view myself as if I am God’s trace to be approached respectfully by myself as if I were the other. The egotism underlying this experience constitutes the radical isolation from the call of the other. This isolation amounts to idolatry and constitutes the root of all injustice.

8 E. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster, 1987, ‘Meaning and sense’, 107. The translation is slightly revised according to the French original in: E. Levinas, En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris, 1974, thirth edition, 202.

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On the one hand, philosophy may be regarded as the plea for the integrity of the subject, combating irrational myths that try to overwhelm the subject with numinous experience, robbing the subject of its freedom and autonomy. Chasing the gods away is not only the essence of the prohibition of idolatry but of philosophy as well. In that respect philosophy may be considered an ally of monotheism in the shared rejection of idolatry (Levinas, 1976, 30). On the other hand, philosophy casts doubt on all religious experience. Considering the other as a re-edition of myself: considering the other as a mirror-image of myself, seems to be the height of rational thinking, denying the notion of revelation any domain in rational thought. The notion of the equality of all people can be underlined by precisely this standpoint. However, the primary experience of the other being radically ‘other’ and, in a religious sense, closer to God than I myself, is refuted by it. By denying the difference between me and the other, the dimension of majesty and of transcendence is detracted from the experience of the other. The other is reduced to the phenomenological realm to which I myself belong as well. By chasing away the experience of alterity, connected to the difference between me and the other, all otherness is absorbed into the unity of rational thought. Freedom comes down to limitation of my freedom by the freedom of others. Should this be considered idolatry? Levinas quotes the Rabbis who treat the disrespect accorded to the Torah (the Biblical revelation) as a form of idolatry. Denying that the Torah comes from heaven is tantamount to idolatry, the Rabbis state. According to Levinas this is not a pious or fundamentalist outrage over an approach to the Scripture as a human document, but it is the defense of the prophetic dimensions of the Word of God demanding concrete protection of the widow and the orphan, by which the natural order is transcended.9 Regarding the other as a re-edition of myself emphasizes equality and common humanity, but chases away the experience of majestic reverence and of holiness which Levinas attaches to the face of the other. Still we should be more nuanced than this single quotation of Levinas suggests. Western rational thought is not only denying the

9 E. Levinas, ‘Mépris de la Torah comme idolatrie’, in À l’heure des nations, Paris, 1988, 74–78.

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otherness of the other, denying the religious concepts of revelation and of heteronomy legitimacy in rationality, but at the same time rightly unmasks many forms of religiosity as the denial of the integrity of the subject. Hence both idolatry understood as the denial of the alterity of the other, and the refutation of idolatry being the undermining of the integrity of the subject, are hallmarks of philosophy.10 Religion, Philosophy, Idolatry Reducing the different religious options to possible inter-human relationships, we are able to distinguish three patterns: 1. The other is source of holiness, respect and transcendence. My obligation towards the other as innite responsibility cannot be described as reciprocal and presupposes the irreducible difference between me and the other. The reverence due to God and the reverence due to the other are mutually compatible: they presuppose and illuminate each other. 2. The other is a human being like myself and equal to me. This standpoint coincides with the experience described above to identify the other with myself as my ‘alter ego’. The other constitutes a mirror-image of myself, but no more than that. The respect due to the other is equal to the respect due to myself. There is no ethical difference between sacrice of oneself on behalf of the other and demanding the sacrice of the other on behalf of oneself. The emphasis on equality denies the asymmetry of the other, but defends the integrity of the subject. 3. God’s transcendence can be assumed by certain individuals to claim an authority equal to God. The reverence due to God is no longer a trace to be followed by approaching the other, but distributes itself over individuals aspiring for power, as if the subject can isolate himself with his god and become intoxicated by en-thousiasm at the exclusion of the other. This constitutes the essence of idolatry. This does not mean, however, that all religious authority should be considered idolatrous. Non-idolatrous authority should consist

10 Incidentally, the similarity between this dual view of philosophy and the Patristic concept of philosophy as the ‘gold and silver taken from Egypt’, equally suited for service to God at the tabernacle and for the idolatry of the golden calf, is noteworthy.

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however, in referring to the face of the other as the genuine source of holiness and of respect. It means that a Christology understood from this ethical perspective of my innite obligation towards the other, should enhance and deepen this asymmetry. Otherwise the Christology would run the risk to be a form of idolatry itself, in spite of the fact that early Christianity molded its identity by rejecting idolatry even putting one’s life at stake. It should be pointed out that the Son of Man, hidden in the existence of the hungry, the poor, the naked, the sick and the mourning, can be approached only by doing justice to “the least of these my brethren” (Matthew 25:40) (Poorthuis, 1998: 201–213). This then holds good both for Christology and for the philosophy of Levinas. It implies that the notion of man created in the image and likeness of God should not be understood as an ontological trait that I have in common with all other persons. It is the revelation of the divine commandment: You shall not kill”, that I detect in the face of the other. Admittedly, the other might detect the same commandment while facing me, but that is not something I am aware of. Being myself in the image and likeness of God points toward an innite responsibility for all of mankind and even for all of the cosmos, without being able to dispose of even part of the burden by relegating it to the other. Underlying the shared dignity of all humans being created in the image of God, is my surplus of responsibility. As long as I am aware of that responsibility, the idols are crushed by my behaving as God’s image and likeness. As long as I detect God’s image and likeness in the other, the idols are not able to delude me with their mimesis of divine revelation. This mimesis would lead me to believe that I can be in touch with God by isolating myself from the other. Even a statement on the equality of all man fails to acknowledge the basis of that equality: my surplus of respect toward the other. Idolatry and art Identifying the reverence due to the other with the reverence due to myself, constitutes the deluding aspect of seeing one’s face in the mirror. “I am another”, this alienating experience constitutes the essence of art. In art, the objects assume a quasi-revelatory status, as if they can no longer be understood as elements in a familiar world, but as coming from beyond, from the other side. The glory and splendor of

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art is majestic and treacherous at the same time, embarking the contemplating subject on a journey with unknown destiny. The splendor and lie of art should not be regarded as a condemnation or as a aw in its essence. It is the concrete way art shows itself: it is the modality of art to assume the authority of a religious revelation while at the same time deluding the observer. Art disconnects objects from their natural horizon by representing them as if they were totally new, from the rst days of creation, unsoiled by habit or by language. Art aspires to revelation, but mingled with the experience of contemplating oneself in the mirror as if one is another. The religious authority of revelation and of ethical responsibility gives way to an utter irresponsible attitude that remains totally mundane. This analysis of art as both glorious and deluding, conveying both meanings of the Greek ‘doxa’, should not be regarded as a criticism of art or as a wholesale condemnation of it, on the contrary, it constitutes the proper way art shows itself, distinct from but imitating the revelation of the face of the other. Conclusion By delving into the Biblical roots of the prohibition of idolatry, we discovered a curious contradiction in the concept of idolatry. The deication of man constitutes the essence of idolatry while at the same time only man is created in the image of God. The idea of an asymmetry between myself and the other allowed us to distinguish between both. The image of God I recognize in encountering the other, not by viewing myself, as it were in the mirror. This idea of an asymmetry between myself and the other led us to important ethical consequences for religion and for art. An egalitarian philosophy in which the otherness of the other is denied or replaced by a common trait of being member of the human species would obscure the essence of the prohibition of idolatry. LITERATURE Primary literature Heschel, A.J., ‘The Sacred Image of Man’, in: The Insecurity of Freedom, New York, 1975. Husserl, E., Carthesianische Meditationen (Husserliana I) Den Haag, 1950.

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Levinas, E., ‘Mépris de la Torah comme idolatrie’, in À l’heure des nations, Paris, 1988, 74–78. ———, ‘Une réligion d’adultes’, in: Difcile Liberté, Paris, 1976, second ed. ———, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster, 1987. ———, En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris, 1974, thirth ed. Secondary literature Duyndam, J., Poorthuis, M., Levinas, Rotterdam , 2003 (Serie Kopstukken). Poorthuis, M., ‘Asymmetrie, Messianismus, Inkarnation. Die Bedeutung von Emmanuel Levinas für die Christologie’, in: J. Wohlmuth (ed.), Emmanuel Levinas—eine Herausforderung für die christliche Theologie, Paderborn-München-Wien, 1998. ———, ‘The Prohibition of Idolatry: Source of Humanity or Source of Violence? Early Jewish and Christian Perspectives on the Prohibition of Images: a Hermeneutic Approach’, in R. Burggraeve a.o. (eds.), Desirable God? Our Fascination with Images, Idols and New Deities, Leuven, 2003, 39–60. Welten, R., ‘Image and Oblivion: Emmanuel Levinas’ Phenomenological Iconoclasm’, in Literature & Theology 19/1 (March 2005), 60–73.

PART TWO

JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN DEBATES ON IMAGES UNTIL THE REFORMATION

7. BIBLICAL CONTROVERSY: A CLASH BETWEEN TWO DIVINELY INSPIRED MESSAGES? Shulamit Laderman (Bar-Ilan University; Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem) Introduction: The Prohibition of Images and the Making of the Desert Tabernacle Reading the account of the Revelation on Mount Sinai in Exodus, Chapters 19 and 20, one is struck by the visual details in the description of this ‘mysterium tremendum’. The biblical text describes how on the third day there were ‘thunder and lighting and a thick cloud upon the Mount and the voice of the horn exceedingly loud’ (Exod. 19:16), that ‘Mount Sinai was altogether on smoke because the Lord descended upon it in re’ (Exod. 19:18), and that God gave the people of Israel the Ten Commandments afrming His transcendence saying, ‘I am the Lord thy God . . . and You shall not make for yourself a graven image’ (Exod. 20:2–3). After conveying the Ten Commandments, the text, in Exodus 20:15, describes the people’s reactions: ‘      ’—‘And all the people saw the voices and the lightning and the noise of the horn and the mountain smoking’. The question is, ‘How do you see voices’? And why, in view of this unnatural revelation, does the biblical text again accentuate God’s warning (Exod. 20:19,20): ‘Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven. Ye shall not make with me gods of silver neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold’? Several chapters later, in Exodus 25, Moses descends from Mount Sinai after having been there forty days and forty nights and passes God’s word on to the people of Israel, saying: ‘. . . make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. According to all that I show you, the pattern of the Tabernacle and the pattern of all the furniture’ (Exod. 25:8,9). The rst instructions for building the Tabernacle deal with constructing the Ark of the Testimony, which was to be made of pure gold, with a Cherub standing on either side of its cover, and placed in the Holy of Holies (Fig. 1).

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According to classic Jewish interpretation, the Cherubim had the likeness of a child’s face (Rashi, Exod. 25:18); they were conceived as being male and female and facing each other with their wings stretched out high above the cover of the Ark (TBYoma 54a). Clearly, there is a tension between the concept of the transcendent God that is not to be represented in any visual form in Exodus Chapter 20 and the instructions to create images in the Holy of Holies of God’s Tabernacle in Exodus 25. To accentuate this tension, Exodus 31:1–5 species that Bez’alel, the consummate artist, whose name means ‘in God’s shadow’, was chosen by God himself to make the Tabernacle and its vessels and that God lled him with the gift of His Spirit, which includes the ability, intelligence, knowledge, and skill to meet the task. Without a doubt we have here a classic example of a clash between two divinely inspired messages, one prohibiting the making of any icon or graven image and another mandating the making of artistic icon-like images. Clearly, any attempt to resolve this contradiction should start by noting that when Moses was commanded to build the Tabernacle he was shown a specic and detailed pattern for it and for all the elements within it, including the Ark and its Cherubim. As the Bible says: ‘And see that thou make them after their pattern, which is being shown thee in the Mount’ (Exod. 25:40). He was told to have the Cherubim spread out their wings on high, screening the Kaporet (the cover of the Ark) with their wings, thus essentially creating an empty space above the Kaporet, and it was through this empty area that God was to talk with Moses (Exod. 25:22): ‘There I shall meet with thee and I will speak with thee from above the cover of the Ark, from between the two Cherubim which are upon the Ark of the Testimony’. In effect, when the biblical text describes God’s intercourse with Moses after the Tabernacle was built, it says: ‘And when Moses went into the tent of meeting that he might speak with him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the cover that was upon the Ark of the Testimony, from between the two Cherubim, and He spoke unto him’ (Num. 7:89). These passages clearly indicate that through the ‘pattern’ given to Moses and executed by Bez’alel, God directed Moses and the people of Israel to visualize His invisible presence through the space framed by the Cherubim’s wings spread over the Kaporet and not through the image of the Cherubim themselves. This idea that the Cherubim were not meant to be iconic images, but rather designed as a metaphor for God’s transcendence is found

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in Solomon’s Temple (I Kings 8), which was built on the model of the Tabernacle. The two specially executed Cherubim on either side of the Ark were meant to create an empty space between their spread wings. When the Second Temple was built, the Ark of the Covenant no longer existed and the Holy of Holies remained completely empty, reecting the memory of the Ark and the Cherubim and clearly afrming God’s invisible presence. With the help of Jewish and Christian-Byzantine visual artistic expressions, the present article examines the conceptual conict between the second commandment forbidding graven images and the command to build the Tabernacle with its Ark, its Cherubim, and all the other elements contained within it. As we scrutinize these artistic examples, two of the questions presented in the Utrecht conference’s position paper are addressed:1 How do we dene and evaluate the tension between word and icon in the religions of the Book, and is the ‘word’ more appropriate than the ‘image’ or the ‘icon’ in approaching the sacred? Tabernacle/Temple/Ark Symbolic Structure The earliest Jewish artifacts relating to the conceptual conict discussed here are Jewish coins issued by Bar Kochba, known also as Bar Kuzeba,2 during his unsuccessful revolt against the Romans in 132–135 C.E. (Fig. 2). The motifs appearing on these coins reect the unique signicance of the Tabernacle/Temple/Ark similar to ideas expressed in the rst century by Philo of Alexandria (On the Life of Moses, On the Special Laws, Questions and Solutions in Exodus) and by Josephus (War of the Jews, Antiquities of the Jews). A thorough study of the iconography of these different motifs and their background provides a better understanding of the essence of the Tabernacle/Temple/Ark and its Cherubim as a meaningful symbolic structure.

1 Position paper for the church history conference Iconoclash: The Struggle for Religious Identity, August 24–27, 2005; Utrecht, The Netherlands. 2 Bar Kochba ‘Son of a Star’ was the name given to the leader of the second Jewish uprising by Rabbi Akiva, who was inspired by the verse “A star goes forth from Jacob” (Num. 24:17) and considered him a messianic leader. The name Bar Kuzeba ‘son of falsehood’ might have been a pejorative appellation given to him when his attempted revolutionary coup failed.

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The inception of this symbolic structure came sixty-two years after the destruction of the Temple. Bar Kochba and his rebels chose to express their independence from Rome by taking Roman coins out of circulation and hammering them to be used as a base (an) for new Jewish coinage (Mildenberg 1984). In so doing, they defaced the signs of Roman power, such as the emperor’s bust or the Roman eagle, and replaced them with symbols that demonstrated the centrality of the Temple as the focus of God’s holiness and sanctity. It is important to note that Bar Kochba chose not to melt down the Roman coins, but to overstrike their iconic signs of power with new a-iconic symbols of demarcation for his Jewish religious and national aspirations, thus declaring war against Roman sovereignty and its pagan religion.3 The architectural motif on the face of Bar Kochba’s coins is a representation of a Temple facade made of four columns with an architrave above them (Fig. 2). Between the two central columns, where Roman coins generally pictured the statue of a god, there is a rectangular pattern of dotted lines, rounded at the top, with two dots in the center. Below it are two horizontal bars connected by short vertical crossbars. Various opinions have been offered by scholars in their efforts to explain the meaning of the images on these coins. Muehsam (1966) summarizes many of the ideas as follows: The Temple facade on the coins has only a symbolical meaning: it could represent the Tabernacle in the desert (Hill 1914), the ideal Temple that Bar Kochba wanted to erect (Romanoff 1944), the ‘Screen of the Tabernacle’ (Rogers 1914), or a synagogue with a Torah shrine (Reifenberg 1947). The small structure in the center of the coin might represent: a door (Merzbacher 1877), two Scrolls of the Law resting on a shelf inside the Torah Ark (Reifenberg 1947) or the Ark of the Covenant (Rogers 1914). Muehsam’s own theory is that the coin reects what the High Priest saw as he stood on the summit of Mount Olives and slaughtered the red heifer—the entrance to the Temple and the Holy of Holies (symbolized by the Ark of the Covenant). Revel-Neher (1984) and other scholars (Madden 1881, Hill 1914, Reifenberg 1950, Narkiss 1968) identify the pattern in the center of the coin as a side view of the Ark of the Covenant (Fig. 1). The rect-

3

Position paper (above, note 1, p. 5).

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angular part, they say, represents the body of the Ark, the overarching top represents the Cherubim with their wings shielding the Kaporet, and the two dots in the center represent the poles attached to the sides of the Ark. Thus, they conclude that all these symbols signify the eternal divine Covenant and Presence (Shechinah) in the Tabernacle and in the Temple. It is reasonable to presume that Bar Kochba molded these symbols on the coins as an afrmation of his faith and as a constant reminder for the people that the Divine Presence was still in their midst and that the Temple was still the center of holiness even after its destruction. Concepts of Sanctity in the Mishnah and Tosephta Bar Kochba’s coins were created during the period in which the spiritual leaders, the Tannaim (the rabbis of the oral law of the Mishnah) struggled to make the Halachah (the Jewish code of law) relevant to the reality of life after the destruction of the Temple. The Mishnah reconstituted Jewish life to stress the notion of holiness and ritual purity that the Temple had inspired. It used the Temple structure to demonstrate that sanctity is gained by establishing gradations of holiness, as found in Mishnah Kelim (1:8,9), where in an escalating order it names the degree of kedushah (sanctity) assigned to different areas in the Temple. For example, the sanctity attached to the area inside the barrier surrounding the Temple, the Soreg, the increased sanctity given to the courtyard of the Israelites, to the courtyard of the priests, to the Temple sanctuary (Heichal), and nally to the Holy of Holies (Dvir). The motifs on Bar Kochba’s coins seem to reect the same gradation of the Temple’s holy realms: The image of the low horizontal railing, the chancel screen seen on the bottom of the coin, symbolizes the Soreg (Branham 1992) mentioned in the Mishnah Middot (2:3) and in Josephus (Whiston 1957). The Soreg was the rst barrier as one approached the Temple. It bore an inscription forbidding any foreigner from entering ‘under pain of death’, thus indicating to the Jewish worshipper that here was the beginning of sacred space. Above the Soreg, on the coin, is the representation of the entrance to the space of the ‘Holy’ (the Heichal) seen as four columns with a beam on top. In the center of the coin the schema of the Cherubim’s spread wings forms an arch above a rectangular structure with two dots in the middle representing the Holy of Holies (the Dvir). These two dots serve as the symbol of the

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two staves that were permanently attached to the Ark even inside the Dvir, as we read in (Exod. 25:15): ‘The staves shall be in the rings of the Ark; they shall not be taken from it’. The length of the Ark’s staves was a little greater than the distance end to end of the Holy of Holies, where the Ark was kept (I Kings 8:8): ‘And the staves were so long that the ends of the staves were seen from the holy place, before the Holy of Holies; but they could not be seen without’. In trying to understand the description of the poles ‘seen’ and ‘not seen’ the rabbis reasoned in Chapter 7 of the Braita de-Melekhet HaMishkan [BMM] (Kirschner 1992) that the Ark was inside the Holy of Holies, but the ends of its poles extended into the Parochet and were seen in the Heichal ‘as a woman’s breasts’ may be seen through her garment. (Fig. 2). This metaphor was based on an exegetical understanding of the verse in Song of Songs (1:13): ‘My beloved is unto me as a cluster of myrrh, that lieth between my breasts’ (Lieberman 1955–1973). Midrash Zuta Shir HaShirim (Buber 1925) interprets this verse ‘   ’ (‘that lies between my breasts’) to mean that God’s presence—the Shechinah—resides between the two poles under the two Cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant. Thus, the dotted line around the arched structure with the two dots in its center seem to be a visual representation of the area the rabbis called the ‘Ama Traxsin’ (Mishnah Middoth 4:7, Tosefta Yoma 3:2, Yerushalmi Yoma 5:42b, Yerushalmi Kilai’im 8:31, Bavli Yoma 51: b–52:a, Bavli Baba Bathra 3a), namely, a space of an Ama (cubit in size) between the two Parochot that separated ‘the Holy’ from the ‘the Holy of Holies’.4 The Ama Traxsin served an important function on Yom Kippur when the High Priest, who was the only person permitted to enter the Holy of Holies, did not go straight in, but approached it through the intermediate area of the Ama Traxsin. His way from the Heichal (Holy) to the Dvir (Holy of Holies) is described in the second-century text of Tosefta Yoma (2:12,13): ‘He walked between the two Parochot until he reached the north.5 When he reached the north he turned around to face south. He continued walking until he reached the space between the poles where

4

‘Traxsin’ is a Greek word that means ‘confusion’ as to which space the Ama Traxsin was taken from—the Holy or the Holy of Holies (Lieberman 1959). 5 The longitudinal layout of the Temple was from east to west.

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the Ark was. He then pushed open the [inner] Parochet with his knees and placed the pan [carrying the incense] between the poles.’ The BMM adds another dimension: ‘As the poles were extended, so also were the wings [of the Cherubim] extended, concealing the Ark and covering its poles from above’, which relates to the arch formed by the wings of the Cherubim (Fig. 2). All of these literary details are symbolically represented on the coin. There was no attempt to picture the Ark itself; rather the intent was to create a visual representation of the Ama Traxsin in front of the Holy of Holies, the pinnacle of holiness. It seems highly probable that Bar Kochba knew these rabbinic sources and had them in mind when he formulated the visual schema of the coin. His apparent desire to maintain the feeling of sanctity that the Temple had inspired, accounts for the translation of the Ama Traxsin’s literary sources to the visual image on the face of the coins. Bar Kochba, a military leader who lived and fought in the secular world and was confronted by the proximity as well as the remoteness of the concept of holiness, used his coins to create a symbol that would be a reminder of the sacred service of the Temple and of the possibility of forgiveness that the High Priest brought the people once a year—on the Day of Atonement. An unusual number of the Bar Kochba coins have a hole in them (Meshorer 1966) (Fig. 3). These coins continued to circulate as precious jewels and charms, passing from hand to hand and so spreading the visual image of the Ama Traxsin throughout the Jewish and the Christian worlds. The same motifs are found in the third-century Dura Europos synagogue in Syria, discovered by chance in 1932. The image of the Temple facade (Fig. 4) has a prominent place above the Ark on the western wall of the synagogue and seems to be a copy of the image pictured on the front of the Bar Kochba coins, with an arched area above that has a conch symbolizing holiness and sanctity. Other murals found on the western wall of Dura Europos emphasize the link between the schematic image of the Ark with the Cherubim and the memory of the Tabernacle/Temple’s special worship and rituals. The mural known as the ‘Dedication of the Sanctuary’ (Fig. 5) depicts the order of service of the High Priest—the Seder Haxavodah—that was incorporated into the synagogue’s liturgy for the Day of Atonement after the Temple was destroyed and is still recited today.

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Here, Aaron, the High Priest, is seen standing next to the Holy of Holies. The Ark shown within it has the same schematic appearance as on the Bar Kochba coins—a rectangle with an arch symbolizing the wings of the two Cherubim. The name Aaron indicates the generic typology, for any and all who will serve as the ‘instrument of forgiveness for the people of Israel’. Aaron’s impressive stance is in keeping with the liturgy for the Day of Atonement, which is based on Ben Sirah’s (50:5–16) description of the High Priest coming out of the Holy of Holies. The prayer ‘How glorious indeed was the High Priest when he safely left the Holy of Holies’ is reected in this picture. The Tabernacle’s Pattern in Hellenistic Judaism and in Byzantine Christian Works Interestingly enough, the symbolic schema of the Tabernacle and the Ark that appears on Bar Kochba’s coins and in the Dura Europos synagogue is also found in a Byzantine manuscript, A Christian Topography for the Whole Universe (Fig. 6). This treatise is thought to have been written and illustrated in the sixth century, but known only from ninth, eleventh and twelfth century copies (Wolska-Conus 1962, 1990). An extensive critical edition of this illuminated Byzantine-Christian work established the authorship as belonging to a man originally known as Cosmas Indicopleustes, later identied as Constantine of Antioch (Wolska-Conus 1989, Kessler 1995). Constantine of Antioch, who wrote and illustrated his thesis as a response to the ‘scientic’ theories of his period, clearly accepted the Bible as the ‘Divine Truth’ and as the foundation of all knowledge. He used an allegorical exegesis based on Hellenistic Judaism’s method of understanding the Bible, attributing cosmic and theological signicance to the Tabernacle/Temple (McCrindle 1897). He views it as the ‘pattern’ of Creation that Moses was commanded to execute (Exod. 25:40): ‘according to the pattern shown to thee on the Mount’, as explained by Philo and Josephus. In their view, the detailed description of the Tabernacle’s structure and its vessels was based on the notion that it is a microcosm of the universe. According to Philo, the entire universe is the veritable Temple of the True God (‘On the Special Laws I’, Sec. 67), and the structure of the Tabernacle/Tent built by Moses at God’s command symbolizes the Divine Creation in its entirety.

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The author of the Christian Topography alluded to the same ideas when he chose to use the schema of the rectangular form with an arch as an expression of God’s pattern for both the Creation and the Tabernacle. In his imagery, the hemisphere at the top of the gure symbolizes the heavenly realm; the rectangular base at the bottom represents the earthly domain; the line dividing the base from the arched upper part represents the rmament that was created on the second day (Genesis 1:6) to separate the earthly and the heavenly worlds. Constantine of Antioch believed that the pattern of the Creation was the blueprint for the Tabernacle, with the line of the rmament representing the curtain, the Parochet, that separated the Holy and the Holy of Holies. He also used the schema presented as the ‘Symbol of the Universe’ and as the Tabernacle in the wilderness as the formal representation of the Ark of the Covenant (Revel-Neher 1984, 1990/1991, Kessler 1990/1991) (Fig. 7), with the same rectangular base and the same vaulted form at the top, but here there is an addition. The hemisphere that symbolizes the Cherubim’s wings shielding the Kaporet has two tetramorphic Cherubim emerging from it. The iconography of the schema is clear, since the treatise of the Christian Topography elaborates in ‘words’ the meaning of the ‘images’. The written text of the third and fth books, of the Christian Topography, specify: Having then been commanded to make the Tabernacle he made it according to the pattern which had been shown to him, and also its appurtenances according to their pattern, the Ark of testimony and the Mercy seat [Kaporet] above and the two Cherubim stretching out their wings, and overshadowing the Mercy-seat above . . . (McCrindle 1897, Book 5, p. 146)

or And the second Tabernacle which is behind the veil [Parochet] and called the Holy of Holies, as well as the Ark of Testimony and the Mercy-seat and above it the Cherubim of glory shadowing the Mercy-seat, are according to the Apostle, a type of the things in heaven from the rmament to the upper heaven, just as the space from the veil to the wall of the inner Tabernacle constitutes the inner place. (McCrindle 1897 Book 3, p. 111)

Thus, the lower part of the Ark represents both the ‘earth’ and the ‘Holy’ of the Tabernacle. The upper part, the vaulted space, symbolizes both the heaven and the ‘Holy of Holies’, and the tetramorphic Cherubim added at the top signify the cosmic, spiritual meaning of the Ark of the Covenant.

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The cosmic image of the Ark of the Covenant is manifested by several details that link it to the theophany of the Creation. The special schema images the ‘Symbol of the Universe’ and its creation, the two haloed priests pointing to the cover of the Ark, the Kaporet where God made His will known (speaking to Moses from between the Cherubim) and from whence God granted forgiveness (Kaporet related to kippur—mercyforgiveness) and the two Cherubim, the ‘holy creatures’ who praise and sanctify the Lord, above the Kaporet—the Mercy-seat (Fig. 6). This particular representation of the Cherubim, which also appears in the Byzantine manuscripts of the Octateuchs 6 (Weitzmann and Bernabo 1999) might reect Constantine’s wish to attach cosmic importance to the Ark of the Covenant. The Cherubim are not the two-winged creatures that form the arch above the Mercy-seat; they are the holy four-winged creatures that sing the praises of God, as described in Isaiah 6:3, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory’, and in Ezekiel 3:12, ‘Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place’ (Fig. 8). Examining the additions to the basic model of the Ark of the Covenant (Fig. 2) in the Christian Topography illustrations and in the Christian Octateuchs, one senses the shift from the abstract Jewish schema emphasizing the void between the Cherubim’s wings to Christian typological ideas. In the Octateuchs such as seen in fol. 333 of Serail of the eleventh century (Fig. 9), the Cherubim’s wings are spread to make room for the image of a baldachin symbolizing the Christian church. The symbol of the church above the Ark of the Covenant and above the images of Moses and Aaron, the Menorah, and the sacricial animals (on both sides of the Ark) expresses the idea of supersession, as found in the Epistle to the Hebrews. There are two specic ideas in the Epistle that attest to the Christian practice of endowing the Tabernacle with new spiritual signicance. The rst deals with the priesthood as a spiritual concept and the second with the expiation of the Day of Atonement. Thus, according to the Epistle, when Jesus was resurrected and ascended to heaven, he entered the heavenly Temple. On his way to heaven, he passed through the 6

Special illustrated volumes of eight books including the Pentateuch and the books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth.

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Holy of Holies, ending the Jewish ritual practice of material sacrices and abrogating the expiation of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. In discussing the earthly Tabernacle (Heb. 8:1–6), the author of the Epistle refers to the Old Testament verse (Exod. 25:40): ‘according to the pattern shown to thee in the Mount’ and uses it to prove that the earthly Tabernacle was built according to the image of the Divine Temple and that the priests who offered sacrices according to the Law and performed the holy service in the earthly Tabernacle were in fact following a heavenly model. The Christian Topography illustrates this typology in the picture of the Parousia (Second Coming). In this illustration (Fig. 10) the diagram of the cosmic Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant is used to describe the Christian Topography’s understanding of the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘When the veil of the Temple was rent in twain at the Passion of the Lord . . . it showed that the inner Tabernacle [Holy of Holies] which was invisible and inaccessible to all, and even to the priests, had become visible and accessible to men’ (McCrindle 1897, Book V, p. 148). The symbolic schema of the empty space between the Cherubim’s wings representing the invisible presence of God in the Jewish understanding here becomes the visible presence of Jesus, as is described in the Gospel of Matthew 25:31–34: ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit in state on his throne, with all the nations gathered before him . . .’. In the picture of the Parousia the space is no longer empty but has the image of Jesus, who tore the curtain and went through the Holy of Holies in his ascent to the heavenly Tabernacle made by God. A-iconic Symbol of the Creation-Tabernacle Link The symbolic diagram of the round-topped rectangle returns to Jewish art in the fourteenth-century illuminated Sarajevo Haggadah (Werber 1983). Observing the Creation cycle in the Haggadah’s two opening pages (Fig. 11), Broderick (1984) linked its schematic imagery with the symbol of the universe found in the Christian Topography and in the Byzantine Octateuchs. According to Broderick, the miniaturist of the Sarajevo Haggadah must have been aware of the Creation and Tabernacle link in the Jewish tradition. The vaulted artistic frame used for the days of the

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Creation seems to emphasize the ‘pattern’ given to Moses on Mount Sinai, connecting the sanctity of the Tabernacle to the sanctity of God’s Creation. Indeed, there can be no doubt about this: the Sarajevo Haggadah cycle concludes with two images containing this same vaulted rectangular shape: one shows the community leaving the synagogue (Fig. 12) and the other the messianic Temple (Fig. 13). Both buildings are characterized by an arched entrance that symbolizes the Torah shrine in the synagogue image and the design of the Ark of the Covenant in the messianic Temple image. In the interior of the Spanish synagogue shown in Figure 12, the Holy Ark containing the Torah scrolls is shown open. In Sephardic communities, the Holy Ark is called the Heichal—a synonym for the Shrine, which is reminiscent of the Temple of Jerusalem. Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and the Kabbalistic book of the Zohar (end of the thirteenth century) use this term for the Ark.7 The full-page miniature of the Temple (Fig. 13) has the following subscription: ‘the Holy Temple which will be built soon, in our days’. It is signicant to note how the artist placed the Ark of the Covenant with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments under the gilded wings of the Cherubim, as in the Holy of Holies. Surely, the symbolic schema used in these pictures mirrors the message carried throughout so many generations. Conclusion From all the foregoing, it seems reasonable to conclude that the image of the two Cherubim on the cover of the Ark forming the motif of a round-topped rectangle has a long and complex history in Jewish and Christian art. It emerges as a visual convention for the Ark of the Covenant as early as the second century C.E., when it was adopted in the eschatologically charged images on coins struck during the Bar Kochba revolt (132–135 C.E.). It reappeared as a vaulted rectangular shape in the middle of the third century on the murals of the synagogue at Dura Europos. It was adopted by the Byzantine art of the Christian Topography, where it represents several related motifs: the image of the universe,

7

It is still used today in Sephardic communities.

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the image of the Tabernacle, the image of the Ark of the Covenant, and the Parousia. It made further appearances in Byzantine art as the symbol of both the Creation and of the Tabernacle/Temple/Ark theme. It then appeared in the fourteenth century in the Sarajevo Haggadah, connecting the cosmic meaning of the Tabernacle/Temple/Ark to the Creation and preserving the ‘memory of the Temple’, with the hope of its being rebuilt as a center of sanctity and holiness. In all of these examples there is a strong connection between word and image. In conclusion, the Jewish and Christian visual examples described here help to assess the role of the ‘word’ and the ‘image’ in approaching the sacred. In both traditions the visual image and the word—biblical, exegetical, theological, or typological—were bound together in approaching the sacred, be it the memory of the Temple and the eschatological hope for its rebuilding in the future in the Jewish tradition or the doctrine of supersession in the Christian tradition. LITERATURE Primary literature Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates 3:102–187, London, LCL, 1930, 364–406. Philo, De vita Mosis 2:31–135, London, LCL, 1939, 484–514. ———, Quaestiones et Solutiones in Exodum 2:51–124, London, LCL, 1953, 97–176. ———, De specialibus legibus 1:66–97, London, LCL, 1958, 136–154. Secondary literature Branham, J.R., ‘Sacred Space Under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Churches’, in Art Bulletin, 74,3 (1992), 375–394. Broderick, H.R., ‘Observations on the Creation Cycle of the Sarajevo Haggadah’, in Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 47 (1984), 320–332. Hill, G.F., British Museum Catalogue Vol. Palestine, London, 1914. Kessler, H.L., ‘Through the Temple Veil: The Holy Image in Judaism and Christianity’, in Kairos N.F. 32/33 (1990/1991), 53–77. ———, ‘Gazing at the Future: The Parousia Miniature in Vatican gr. 699’, Byzantine East, Latin West Art: Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann, Princeton, 1995, 365–375, n. 1. Kirschner, R., Baraita de-Melekhet Ha-Mishkan, Cincinnati, 1992, 233. Lieberman, S., ‘Esser Mililin’, in Eshkolot (a Hebrew Journal Devoted to the Study of Classical Culture and Its Meaning) 3 (1959) 89. ———, Tosefta Ki-Peshuta, New York, 1955–1973, Chapter 2, Halachah 15. Lowden, J., The Octateuchs, A Study in Byzantine Manuscript Illustration, University Park, 1992. McCrindle, J.W., [tr.], The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, London, 1897, Book 3, 111, Book 5, 146. Madden, F.W., Coins of the Jews, London, 1881, 102. Merzbacher, E., ‘Untersuchungen über althebraische Munzen’, in Zeitschrift für Numismatik 4 Berlin (1877) 353, no. 95.

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Meshorer, Y., Jewish Coins of the Second Temple Period, Tel Aviv, 1966, 60–67. Mildenberg, L., The Coinage of the Bar Kokhba War, Frankfurt am Main, 1984, 22, 23. Muehsam, A., Coin and Temple: A Study of the Architectural Representation on Ancient Jewish Coins, Leeds, 1966, 1–18, 26–32. Narkiss, B., ‘The Image of Jerusalem in Art’, in The University, 13, 3 (1968), 11–20. Reifenberg, A., Ancient Jewish Coins, Jerusalem, 1947, 60, no. 163. ———, Ancient Jewish Arts, New York, 1950, 69. ———, Israel’s History in Coins, London, 1953, 22, g. 5. Revel-Neher, E., Le signe de la rencontre —L’arche d’alliance dans l’art juif et chrétien du second au dixieme siecles, Paris, 1984, 71, 72, 75–80. ———, ‘Some Remarks on the Iconographical Sources of the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes’, in Kairos, N.F., 32/33 (1990/1991), 78–97. Rogers, E., A Handy Guide to Jewish Coins, London, 1914, 52. Romanoff, P., Jewish Symbols on Ancient Jewish Coins, Philadelphia, 1944, 38, 41f. Werber, E., The Sarajevo Haggadah, Belgrade and Sarajevo, 1983. Weitzmann, K., & Bernabo, M., The Byzantine Octateuchs, Princeton, 1999. Wolska-Conus, W., La Topographie Chrétienne de Cosmas Indicopleustes: hypotheses sur que théologie et science au VI siècle, Paris, 1962. ———, ‘Stephanos d’Athenes et Stephanos d’Alexandrie. Essai d’identication et de biographie’, in REB 47 (1989) 28–30. ———, ‘La Topographie Chretienne de Cosmas Indicopleustes: hypotheses sur quelques themes de son illustration’, in REB 48 (1990) 155–191. Whiston, W., [tr.], Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XV, 5, Philadelphia 1957, 474.

8. ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND ITS ERADICATION Shamma Friedman (Bar-Ilan University; Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem) Introduction Loyal to the simple meaning of Scripture, rabbinic Judaism as recorded in the talmudic-midrashic corpus presented God anthropomorphically, in visual terms. When Adam was created, the angels were unable to distinguish him from his Creator (Genesis Rabba 8). Commenting on Deuteronomy 21:22–23 (‘If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, for an impaled body is an affront to God’) R. Meir offered a twinship parable: one twin is King and the other a criminal. When the criminal was crucied for his crimes, and so displayed publicly, the people mistakenly took him for his twin and proclaimed: ‘The king is crucied!’ (Tosefta Sanhedrin 9, 7). Likewise Scripture forbade exposing the body of a person executed for a crime because the human body is the likeness of the Creator. In the second part of this paper I will discuss a rabbinic passage which should be interpreted as an unrecognized visual presentation of the divine image, with human likenesses indistinguishable in both physique and physiognomy, Jacob being the outstanding representative of this paradigm. This is indeed the original meaning of the legend that Jacob’s icon was engraved upon the Divine throne. The rst part of the paper is devoted to Maimonides’ struggle against traditional anthropomorphic concepts, in comparison to Augustine’s work in the same area.

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Maimonides’ (1135–1204) theology swept away all Jewish belief in an anthropomorphous God.1 His learned demonstrations reduced such a belief to philosophic absurdity and dogmatic heresy, capped with denial of a place in the world to come for any wayward devotee of this blasphemy (Mishneh Torah, Repentance, 3, 7). The Rambam, a Hebrew acronym for Maimonides: Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, devoted himself to overcoming the two obstacles he encountered on his path: the texts and the people. Not only the literal meaning, but even the plain and simple meaning2 of Scripture and of the talmudic-midrashic corpus represent God as bearing the form in which He had created man (Weinfeld, Creator, 125, n. 100) and an overwhelming percentage of Jewish intelligentsia in Maimonides’ time certainly subscribed to this concept. The solutions adopted by the master were essentially reading the texts out of their plain meanings through allegory3 and the like, and reading those who professed these ideas out of the fold of the faithful and the wise, making of them boorish savages, more to be pitied than feared. As a zealous ideologue, the Rambam could not be expected to place the beliefs regarding the persona of God in historic perspective, nor perhaps could any medieval thinker, if we are speaking about the history of ideas in the modern sense. Portraying God as a formless being entered Jewish conceptualization only where Judaism intersected with Greek thought, viz., Philo, Saadia Gaon, and Maimonides. Traditional talmudic culture never abandoned the indigenous Jewish concepts, and in fact these were still vigorously championed shortly after Maimonides time by Moses Takau.4 Much of Maimonides’ major philosophic work Guide for the Perplexed is devoted to expunging the simple meaning of ‘image’ in Genesis 1, 27 and similar usages, and distancing himself from the unsophisticated who hold that the ‘image of God’ has a visual connotation. The same 1 The reader will nd more detailed documentation for the general issues touched upon here in Friedman, 2007, in press. 2 On the validity of these concepts, see Milikowsky, 2005. 3 ‘Allegory being dened in the sense of the method of reading promulgated by Philo and Origen, that is, the representation in concrete terms of abstractions which must be supplied from outside in order to interpret the text’ (Boyarin, 1997, II). 4 Ktav Tamim. It was published in a facsimile edition of single surviving manuscript with introduction; Y. Dan, Jerusalem, 1984 (Hebrew).

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themes were already addressed in detail in the Rambam’s early work, the Commentary on the Mishna. Maimonides powerful intellectual stature and inuence eventually wiped out all vestiges of the anthropomorphic God in accepted dogma. A poetic version of his 13 principles, including ‘He has no bodily form’, became the closing hymn of the synagogue service. Little wonder then that the historians of Jewish Thought, down to mid 20th century and beyond, shied away from revealing, no, even recognizing, the plain meaning of rabbinic passages depicting a God of human form. As intellectuals, they came under the powerful attraction of Maimonides, the supreme Jewish intellectual of all times. There is no little irony in the fact that philosophizing the talmudic texts was taken as sophistication, while their responsible philological and historical exposition was reduced to naiveté. Only in recent decades has the pendulum swung in the other direction. Christianity underwent the struggle of eradicating literal anthropomorphism many centuries before the work of the late 12th-early 13th century Jewish sages. In addition to the passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians had to address clearly anthropomorphic contexts in the Gospels and other early Christian works. Origen, in the context of creating Christian Neoplatonism, and others, sought to free Christians from an anthropomorphic understanding of God ‘like that espoused by the Jews’ (Grifn, Paulsen, 2002, 103). It was Augustine (4th century) who undertook the fervent and sustained campaign to eradicate anthropomorphism. Maimonides was destined to repeat some of the intellectual reactions of Augustine to widespread anthropomorphism, including belabored demonstrations and disdainful condescension towards contemporary thinkers. Grifn and Paulsen write: ‘[. . .] contextual and direct evidence in Augustine that would indicate fourth-century Christians did indeed believe God to be both corporeal and anthropomorphic in bodily form [indicates that] the young Augustine was himself a corporealist and knew Christians who believed God to be anthropomorphic, and that this latter belief was a critical impediment to his acceptance of Christianity’ (Grifn, Paulsen, 2002, 96). [According to Augustine] ‘Carnal and childish’ Christians err concerning anthropomorphic language in scripture, understanding it literally instead of allegorically’ (ibidem 110).

In his contribution to this volume, Paul van Geest writes about Augustine as follows:

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shamma friedman ‘As thinker formed by Neo-platonic ideas and almost a Christian, Augustine stated in his early work De ordine that the best way to know Him is by not knowing Him (De ord. 2.16.44) and that the only thing the soul knows of its maker is that it does not know Him (ibid. 2.18.47). In his Confessiones, written during the time he was bishop, he seems to suggest that every representation of the purely spiritual and ineffable God in philosophical reections or in metaphorical language is an infringement of the divine reality’ (Van Geest, 2007, 187)

Furthermore, Van Geest states that Augustine in his twenties had a strong aversion to the primitive anthropomorphisms used in the Bible. The allegorical way of reading the Bible of Ambrose was an indication for him that the Catholic faith did not teach God as having the shape of a human body and that the creation of human being to the likeness of God should not be taken in a literal-anthropomorphic sense (Van Geest, 2007, 183). After he had become a priest and a bishop the inability of the ‘weaker brethren and the little ones’ ( parvuli), the illiterate and the catechumens, who were inuenced by the anthropomorphic God experience of the North African Church to think of God in terms of a purely immaterial entity remained a source of great concern: ‘He (Augustine) does not hesitate to call the idea that God is a corporeal entity a destructive and ruinous lie . . . He proceeds with the cynical remark that the parvulus will gather in temples and mountains in order to seek and nd God . . . quite shocking to the anthropomorphic belief of the parvulus may have been his remark that Solomon’s temple is too small for God, but that rather the parvulus himself has to be a pure temple in which God can be received.’ (Van Geest, 2007, 185)

Because of his allegorical way of reading the Bible, Augustine also rejects the Manichean interpretation that God, therefore, must have teeth, if humankind is created to his likeness, Augustine also rejects as ‘ridiculous’: He (Augustine) recognizes that bodily parts such as God’s eyes, ears, lips and feet are indeed frequently mentioned in the Scriptures. Nevertheless he blames the Manichees that they, rst of all, ridicule the Old Testament anthropomorphisms without realizing that they likewise occur in the New Testament. Secondly, he reproaches them for their defective hermeneutics: if they had accepted the Ambrosian allegorical method, then they could have learned that these anthropomorphic names were not meant as an indication of parts of the body, but referred to the spiritual powers of God. Augustine concludes his argument by referring to the passage in Scripture in which man is said to be made to the image of God . . . for Augustine the anthropomorphic Catholic popular culture and,

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especially, the inability of his parvuli to think of God as a non-corporeal or non-material entity, is still a source of great concern. (Van Geest, 2007, 183, 185)

Similarities of approach and metaphor in Maimonides’ tirades against popular and even rabbinic acceptance of anthropomorphisms are striking. In his Commentary to the Mishna, completed before he reached the age of 35, his thinking on this subject was already full-blown. He characterizes categories of Jewish understanding/misunderstanding on the question of divine anthropomorphisms as follows: the rst group [I am going to describe] . . . understand [anthropomorphisms] literally, and thus leave them unexplained. They do this simply due to their ignorance [boorishness] in philosophy, and distance from the sciences. They lack sufcient [intellectual] perfection to awaken themselves . . . this miserable group, mercy upon their ignorance . . . destroy all the grandeur of Torah . . . and this group expound from the simple meaning of the words of the sages things of which were the gentiles to hear them they would say ‘Certainly this lowly nation is a stupid and boorish people’ (playing on Deuteronomy 4, 6). Many [rabbis] preach publicly matters they do not understand themselves. If only they would keep quiet (Commentary to Sanhedrin 10, 1).5

In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides wrote: That God is incorporeal, that He cannot be compared with His creatures, that He is not subject to external inuence; these are things which must be explained to every one according to his capacity, and they must be taught by way of tradition to children and women, to the stupid and ignorant, as they are taught that God is One, that He is eternal, and that He alone is to be worshipped. Without incorporeality there is no unity . . . Those who are not sufciently intelligent to comprehend the true interpretation of these passages in the Bible, or to understand that the same term admits of two different interpretations, may simply be told that the scriptural passage is clearly understood by the wise, but that they should content themselves with knowing that God is incorporeal (1, 35) (Friedländer, 1942).

In his letter ‘Essay On Resurrection’: When I applied myself to this task, I realized that it was not correct to strive to explain the ramications of the religious law, and to leave its roots neglected, unexplained, and its essentials undiscussed, providing no 5 Mishnah: im Perush Rabbenu Mosheh ben Maimon, Neziqin, with Arabic original, Y. Qah ; , 1964, 200–201 (my translation to English).

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shamma friedman guidance. This is especially urgent since I have met some who think they are among the sages of Israel—by God, they indeed know the way of the Law ever since childhood, and they battle in legal discussions—but they are not certain if God is corporeal, with eyes, hands, and feet, as the Bible says, or if He has not a body. Others, whom I have met in some lands, assert positively that He is corporeal and call anyone who thinks differently a nonbeliever, name him a heretic and Epicurean. They explain the homilies of Berakhot literally. I have received similar reports of some whom I have not met. When I learned of these exceedingly decient folk and their doubts, who, although they consider themselves sages in Israel, are in fact the most ignorant, and more seriously astray than beasts, their minds lled with the senseless prattle of old women and noxious fantasies, like children and women, I concluded that it was necessary that I clearly elucidate religious fundamentals in my works on law. I determined not to teach these basic truths in the idiom of inquiry, since examination of these roots requires skills in many elds, of which, as I pointed out in the Guide, the learned in Torah know nothing. More than anything else I preferred to have the truths accepted by the masses. (Halkin, 212).

Augustine laid the mistaken belief in anthropomorphism at the door of ‘carnal and childish’ Christians, ‘weaker brethren’, ‘illiterate’, and in a word, parvuli, ‘the little ones’, those who suffer from pueritia mentis. The Manichees are reproached for defective hermeneutics and rejection of the allegorical method. These beliefs are ‘a destructive and ruinous lie’. In content and tone, Maimonides replays Augustine. He lashes out against ignorance and boorishness, bemoans those who lack sufcient intellectual perfection to awaken themselves. He is provoked by ‘this miserable group, mercy upon their ignorance’. The stupid and ignorant are not sufciently intelligent to comprehend the true (= allegorical! SF) interpretation of these passages in the Bible. They are ‘decient’ folk who, although they consider themselves sages in Israel, are in fact the most ignorant. They go ‘more seriously astray than beasts, their minds lled with the senseless prattle of old women and noxious fantasies, like children and women’. These are Maimonides’s parvuli. The Christian authors cautioned their ock regarding false doctrines ‘like that espoused by the Jews’. Jewish medievals considered anthropomorphistic thinking among he Jews an embarrassment. Maimonides was annoyed by the possibility that ‘were the gentiles to hear’ the ideas espoused by many Jews ‘they would say ‘Certainly this lowly nation is a stupid and boorish people’’. A thirteenth-century authority warned: ‘But if you think in your thoughts . . . that the Shekhina has a body, [then

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I say that] we are not permitted to think of this and also not to mention it to a non-Jew.’6 There are those, according to Maimonides, who are considered ‘the sages of Israel by God: they indeed know the way of the Law ever since childhood, and they battle in legal discussions. But they are not certain if God is corporeal, with eyes, hands, and feet’. The Manichees, whose thinking attracted Augustine, offered a ‘cynical interpretation of Gen. 1:26 (‘Let us make man to our image and likeness’). Perhaps this God, they suggested, may have nostrils, teeth and a beard, or even internal organs’. What would the proponents of this position say about the passage in The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan which expounds: ‘Adam, too, was born circumcised, for it is said, And God created man in His own image (Gen. 11:27)’ (Version A, I).7 With reference to the words of the prophet Isaiah that for God heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool and that God has measured the heavens in the palm of his hand, Augustine ‘wonders in an almost sarcastic voice whether in this case God’s bottom has the same seize as the palm of his hand’. We will consider two points regarding this passage: gurative language and proportionalism. It is surprising that the opponents of anthropomorphism seem to have been equally threatened by clearly metaphoric or gurative biblical passages as by plain sense explicit description of God in human terms, such as Exodus 24, 10: ‘And they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire’. This is a simple prose description, in contrast to the poetic version of Isaiah 40, 12, which reads (NJPS): Who measured the waters with the hollow of his hand, And gauged the skies with a span, And meted earth’s dust with a measure,

6 Quoted from Oxford MS 2289, fol. 43a. See Abrams, 1994, 320–21. In the continuation of this text we nd: ‘And he who says to them that the Shekhina [indeed] does have a body, foolish Christians will laugh at him and say that the Jews have no [true] wisdom [of their own] . . . But of all this, do not mention a word to the non-Jews, for they do not understand and they share no part in the supernal understanding. Even to the masses of our own people one should conceal this [view], so all the more so from the impure [nations]’. 7 Goldin, 1955, 23. Goldin notes: ‘The image of God, is of course perfect, and so long as one is uncircumcised, he is not perfect’. See context there. Goldin, perhaps apologetically, veers towards the abstract’.

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shamma friedman And weighed the mountains with a scale And the hills with a balance?

The passage is clearly poetic, and its metaphors per se are not descriptions of actual events. Maimonides also struggled with poetic biblical passages with the same intensity he applied to sober prose.8 ‘And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives’ (Zech. xiv. 4) can be explained in the following way: ‘And the things caused by him ([His feet. S.F.]) on that day upon the Mount of Olives, that is to say, the wonders which will then be seen, and of which God will be the Cause or the Maker, will remain permanently.’ . . . In the passage (Exod. xxiv. 10, lit.,’ And there was under his feet, like the action of the whiteness of a sapphire stone’ . . .), Onkelos, as you know, in his version, considers the word raglav ‘his feet’ as a gurative expression and a substitute for ‘throne’: the words ‘under his feet’ he therefore paraphrases, ‘And under the throne of his glory.’ Consider this well, and you will observe with wonder how Onkelos keeps free from the idea of the corporeality of God, and from everything that leads thereto, even in the remotest degree. For he does not say, ‘and under His throne’: the direct relation of the throne to God, implied in the literal sense of the phrase ‘His throne’ would necessarily suggest the idea that God is supported by a material object, and thus lead directly to the corporeality of God: he therefore refers the throne to His glory, i.e., to the Shekhinah, which is a light created for the purpose (Guide, I, ch. 28).9

Thus the poetic ‘his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives’ is converted to the abstract no less than the concrete ‘under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire’. Similarly: The Hebrew {ayin . . . denotes ‘eye’ . . . Another meaning of the word is ‘providence’ . . . In this gurative sense it is to be understood when used in reference to God (ch. 44, ed. Friedländer, 1942, 58).

The ‘eye’ passages cited are used in poetic context and metaphoric, but are treated the same as the more descriptive. Regarding Exodus 33, 20: ‘Then I will take my hand away and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen’, Maimonides writes:

8 ‘Maimonides seems to have refrained from explaining anthropomorphisms as gurative [better: metaphoric. SF] expressions, lest by such interpretation he might implicitly admit the existence of a certain relation and comparison between the Creator and His creatures’ (Friedländer, 1942, xli). 9 Friedländer, 1942, 27. Maimonides’ attempts to ascribe to Onkelos an approach to anthropomorphisms equally philosophic and absolute as his own. This was already called into question by Nahmanides (to Gen. 46, 1). The targumic spiritualizing of the divine persona continued a tendency already found in many biblical passages, but never arrived at absolute philosophic abstraction and denial of form.

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‘The Hebrew term a9hor . . . signifying ‘back’ . . . The term includes also the idea of following a thing and of conforming with the moral principles of some other being . . . In this sense the word occurs in Exodus xxxiii. 20, ‘And thou shalt see my back’ (a9horai): thou shalt perceive that which follows me, is similar to me, and is the result of my will, i.e., all things created by me (ch. 38)’. (ed. Friedländer, 1942, 53–54). Let us return to Isaiah 40, 12: Who measured the waters with the hollow of his hand, And gauged the skies with a span, And meted earth’s dust with a measure, And weighed the mountains with a scale And the hills with a balance?

The metaphors in this verse are measuring and weighing. Although one might assume that the measuring metaphor envisions more than one unit for each action, Augustine did not take it that way. And indeed, the metaphor10 describes the Creator as making each measure with one unit. Hence Augustine’s conclusion: ‘God’s bottom has the same size as the palm of his hand’! Augustine’s ridiculing the anthropomorphism which might be seen in this metaphor, raises the question of proportionalism, which the church father did not really take seriously. Jewish sources did. The mystical work Shiur Qomah,11 already attested in the 6th or early 7th century, insists on perfect proportionalism of the divine anatomy,12 based upon traditions of ideal relative measurements in the human body.13

10

On the cultural parallels see Couroyer, 1966, and Avishur, 1982. ‘It consists of the description of the limbs of God in the gure of a man and reads like a deliberate and excessive indulgence in anthropomorphism. Small wonder that it has deeply shocked later and more sober Jewish thought . . . Jewish apologetics has always tried to explain it away’ (Scholem, 1960, 37). ‘From the very beginning, the frank and almost provocative anthropomorphism of the Shiur Komah aroused the bitterest antagonism among all Jewish circles which held aloof from mysticism’ (ibidem, 63). 12 ‘The width of the forehead [Hebrew: mesah] is as [i.e. equals] the length of the neck; and the lip [similarly] is as the length of the nose. The length of the nose is as the length of the little nger. The height of the cheek [Hebrew: leset] is one half the circumference of the head, and such are the [ideal] proportions of all men’ (Cohen, 1983, 28); ‘the soles of his feet cover the whole universe; the height of his soles is 30,000 thousand parasangs; from the sole to the heel 1,000 times, 1,000 plus 500 parasangs; his square beard is 11,500 parasangs. Each parasang is 3 miles and each mile 10,000 cubits’ (Cohen, 1997, 638). 13 ‘. . . we may assume that originally the measures aimed at conveying the notion of ideal proportions. These proportions were shared by God and man alike . . . Since man was created in the image of God, those interested in the subject felt entitled to make inferences from the physical proportions of the human body to that of God’ (Gruenwald, 1980, 214). See below. 11

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One of the rules of divine correlation of limb dimensions in Shiur Qomah already appears in the Talmud. Among denitions of bodily blemishes disqualifying a kohen from performing priestly functions, the Mishna lists: ‘If his body is too big or too little compared with his other parts; if his nose is too big or too little compared with his other parts’ (Bekhotot 7, 4). To this the Talmud comments: ‘Like the little nger’ (ibid., 44a). In other words, the ideal length of the nose is the length of the little nger (Lieberman, 1939, 12; Lieberman apud Scholem, 1960, 125). Shiur Qomah applies this model to the Divine Presence: ‘The length of the nose is as the length of the little nger’.14

14 Cohen, 1985, 67. Louis Ginzberg suggested that the author of Shiur Qomah ourished in the post talmudic period, and had made use of this talmudic passage (quoted in a letter from Lieberman to Ginzberg dated 1939/40, published in Shapiro, 2006, 16). Lieberman entertained a common external source to the talmudic baraita and Shiur Qomah (Lieberman, 1939, 12), ‘external’ here meaning ‘foreign’: ‘I could not say that the baraita in Bekhorot served as the source for Shiur Qomah, since Shiur Qomah deals at length and in detail with many body parts whose relative proportional measurements are not at all mentioned in Bekhorot. Therefore I conjecture that the material was taken from an external source, namely, from textbooks on sculpture or drawing which were common among the Greeks. Also this exact investigation which concludes that the length of the nose is normally that of the little nger demonstrably points to a source which was specically devoted to addressing the relative size of the limbs’ (Lieberman in Shapiro, op. cit.). In the Ptolemaic temple of Horus at Edfu (between Aswan and Luxor), the catalogue of the temple library, written on the temple walls, includes: ‘In the second chest was contained . . . the Book of rules concerning wall paintings and the proportions of gures’ (see Sarton, 1941, 72, as referenced by Lieberman without elaboration apud Scholem, 1960, 125). Pythagoras, the Greek geometrician, was interested in the ‘golden section’, and proved that it was the basis for the proportions of the human gure. He showed that the human body is built with each part in a denite golden proportion to all the other parts. The proportions of Michelangelo’s David conform to the golden ratio from the location of the navel with respect to the height to the placement of the joints in the ngers. In classical art, the body of the ideal gure is eight head-lengths from head to toe. Disproportion was used in the Talmud for derision. ‘And Abitol the hair-dresser, citing Rab, said [also this]: Pharaoh the contemporary of Moses, was [a puny fellow] a cubit [in height] with a beard a cubit long and his shock of hair a cubit and a span, justifying what is said: And He setteth up over it [the kingdom of men] the lowest of men’. Gershom Scholem opted for an early date for Shiur Qomah: ‘the teachings of the Shiur Komah do indeed represent a second century Jewish tradition’ (Scholem, 1960, 38); ‘As long as the age of the Shiur Komah could not be determined, this could be explained as a mere coincidence or, perhaps, as a quotation from the Baraitha in the Shiur Komah. With our present knowledge, however, we may assume that the true relation of the two passages is just the reverse. That is to say, the application of this rule about the nose in a halakhic context was but a quotation from the Shiur Komah, the composition of which preceded the talmudic speaker, who quotes it, quite rightly, as a Baraitha’ (ibid., p. 41). Liebermann eventually concurred with Scholem’s position (apud Scholem, 1960, 123). However, his explicit pronouncement on this is in regard to the genre of Shiur Komah (cf. Gruenwald, 1987, 101–102; Cohen, 1985, 31), whereas ‘the book Shiur Qomah’

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The author of Shiur Qomah does comment on Isaiah 40, 12, but not (as far as I was able to ascertain)15 on 66, 1. On 40, 12 we nd: But he told me the calculation of parasangs, what their measure is. Every parasang is four miles, and every mile is ten thousand cubits, and every cubit is three spans, and His span lls the entire universe, as it is said ‘Who measured the waters with the hollow of his hand, and gauged the skies with a span.16

A span17 is calculated as the maximum distance between the top of the little nger and the top of the extended thumb, about nine inches.18 Since we have no comment on Isaiah 66, 1 in Shiur Qomah, we can only guess how the author would respond to Augustine.19 One thing,

is the language he uses in recording its sixth century attestation (Cohen, 1985, 124). After an exhaustive study, Martin S. Cohen convincingly concludes that Shiur Qomah is post talmudic: ‘Thus are we led back to an early gaonic date for the composition of the Urtext of the Shi{ur Qomah, a date late enough to post-date the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, and yet early enough to explain why, by the ninth century, the antiquity of the work could be uncontested, and to allow the work to have been known to Kallir. If the sixth century date for Kallir can be maintained, then it is probably the most desirable for the Shi{ur Qomah as well, being both early and late enough to satisfy our various requirements’ (Cohen, 1985, 65). Ezra Fleischer has produced evidence upon which he surmises that Qilir lived between 570–640 CE (Fleischer, 1985, 383–428 (Hebrew with English Summary). It is quite obvious to me that any analysis of style and diction would preclude Tannaitic dating of Shiur Qomah. 15 From the regular versions. A quotation in a medieval fragment (Qah, 1989, 478) does mention the second metaphor: ‘The calves of his legs are the fullness of the entire world, as it says ‘The heavens are my throne etc. [and the earth is my footstool]’. Shiur Qoma often uses ‘are the fullness of the entire world’ in place of a measurement with reference to descriptions in Scripture. 16 Sefer Haqqomah, lines 104–07, Cohen, 1985, 147; my translation from the Hebrew, other translations below by Cohen when presented. 17 Hebrew zeret, see Exodus 28, 16 etc. 18 The span mentioned in the Torah is half a cubit. There are thus two spans to the cubit. ‘Two’, is one of the manuscript readings recorded by Cohen at this passage, as against ‘three’ in his base text; all the variants in the apparatus here are Hebrew numeral names beginning with shin. However, ‘three’ is corroborated by parallel texts included in Cohen’s study. 19 In general, Shiur Qomah does not mention private parts. Neither does it supply width measurements of the torso. As to the measurement of the divine hand, cf: ‘We have stated that the width of His hand is 4,000 (parasangs. We must then ask), is it possible for One regarding whom it was stated, ‘He meted out heaven with the span,’ (to have it said by you that) His hand is only 4,000 parasangs? Rather, (we must conclude that) each parasang of the Holy One, blessed be He, is 240,000,000 terrestrial parasangs, and that each of these parasangs is measured (in terms) of His cubits, and His cubit (equals three) spans. And one handsbreadth (alone of His) lls the entire universe, as it is stated (in Scripture): ‘Who measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, etc.’ (Cohen, 1985, 51–52). Shiur Qomah regularly pictures the throne on top of the universe, with Metatron under it, but still clearly above the heavens,

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however, is certain: his concept of the divine gure is that of absolute proportionality.20 We already noticed that according to Shiur Qomah, God has a square beard (11,500 parasangs in length). This was to the chagrin of the Manichees. Apropos, Maimonides originally accepted Shiur Qomah as an authentic and legitimate Jewish treatise, but eventually rejected it as equivalent to idolatry.21 It may have been the Rambam himself who penned, in substitution for the laudatory original, the following closing lines to Shiur Qomah found in a medieval quotation: ‘All these things are great abominations and blasphemies/cursed is he who believes it and cursed is he who composed it/by the numerical value of every letter in it/for the Lord is a true God/He has no image or measure/neither breadth nor length / as it says, ‘To whom then can you liken God etc. [What form does compare to Him?]’ (Isaiah 40, 18), ‘To whom then can you liken me, to whom can I be compared?’ (ibid., 40, 25).22

Anthropomorphic visual perception of the Godhead in the talmudic-midrashic corpus An explicit anthropomorphic visual perception of the Godhead is indicated in many passages in the talmudic-midrashic corpus, and most of

in consonance with the talmudic model: ‘Levi said: from the earth to the rmament is a distance walkable in 500 years, and from rmament to rmament is a distance walkable in 500 years, and thus for each and every rmament, and R. Helbo said in the name of Abba Samoqa: also the hooves of the Hayoth are a distance walkable in 515 years, the numerical value of y eshara (Ezekiel 1, 7 = ‘straight’). See how high He is above His Universe (since the Hayoth bear the throne)! (Yerushalmi Berakhot 9, 1; 13a). The measurement of a distance walkable in 500 years for the heavens is reected in a quotation from Shiur Qoma in a medieval work: ‘. . . and His span is as the fullness of the universe, a distance walkable in 500 years, as it says: Who measured the waters with the hollow of his hand’ etc. (Dan, 1966, 222). 20 As indicated by statements of relative size, without attempting to work out a system from the numerical measurements, which underwent restatement in textual transmission. This relative size is based on the human model, as stated explicitly: ‘The height of the cheeks is as half of the circumference of the head, and such is the case for any person!’ (v ekhen shel midat ’adam; Cohen, 1985, 68). 21 ‘For only foreign gods have ‘stature’ [= qomah] (Maimonides Responsa, 117, ed. Blau, p. 201). See Lieberman, 1939, 12, 89–98; Lieberman apud Scholem, 1960, 124; Cohen, 1985, 230. 22 Qah, 1989, 478 (cf. 477, n. 11). Maimonides makes extensive use of these two verses in Second Isaiah to prove his point. See my ‘Image’, where I indicate that these two verses are far from representative of approaches to anthropomorphism throughout Scripture, and even on their own they can hardly be taken in the Maimonidean sense.

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these have been listed by writers who have dealt with this subject. Our interpretation of the homiletic expansion on Jacob’s Ladder in Bereshit Rabba23 certainly justies adding this passage to the list. However, before presenting that account we will open with a partial parallel in the gospel of John: When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, ‘Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.’ ‘How do you know me?’ Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, ‘I saw you while you were still under the g tree before Philip called you.’ Then Nathanael declared, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.’ Jesus said, ‘You believe because I told you I saw you under the g tree. You shall see greater things than that.’ He then added, ‘I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’ ( John 1, 47–51).24

‘Son of man’ is the phrase Jesus borrowed from Ezekiel (cf. 2, 6 etc.)25 to refer to himself. The ‘greater things’ which he predicts are a vision in which the heavens are opened, and the ‘angels of God’ ascend and descend upon Jesus. The imagery of angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth clearly connects this passage with Jacob’s Ladder in Genesis 28, 12:26

23

Aspects of the discussion in this part appeared in Friedman, 1994, 233–238. Several scholars have suggested that v. 51 is a ‘detached saying’ and not to be connected with the previous verses (see Brown, 1966, 88–91). This does not affect the substance of our thesis, which deals with this verse alone. Furthermore, the thesis is questionable. Bernard, 1928, 66–67, makes an impressive case for unity. Some of those suggesting detachment refer to the switch from second person singular to plural in addressing Nathanael. However this takes place within v. 51 itself, and is explained by Bernard: ‘Nathanael is only one of those who are to see ‘the heaven opened and the angels ascending and descending,’ etc.’ (ibidem, 66). 25 Probably through mediating literature (cf. Daniel 7, 13; 1 Enoch 48, 2; Odes of Solomon 38, 3). See also the extensive discussion in Kittel, vol. II, 400–77. 26 This connection was already made by Augustine: ‘Scalam vera istam intellegitur ipse Salvator nobis in memoriam revocare in evangelio, ubi, cum dixisset de Nathanael: Ecce vere Israelita, in quo dolus non est, quia Israel viderat istam visionem—ipse est enim Iacob—eodem loco ait: Amen, amen, dico vobis, videbitis caelum apertum et angelos Dei ascendentes et descendentes super lium hominis’ (‘And truly our Saviour himself is known to have recalled that ladder to our minds in the Gospel (when he had said of Nathaniel: ‘Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile,’ then because Israel had seen that vision—for Israel is Jacob himself )—he continued in the same speech: ‘Verily, verily, I say to you, you shall see the heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man’, De Civitate Dei, 16.39. 24

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King James

He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and the angels of God were going up and down on it.

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

Jesus pictures himself as the bridge connecting heaven and earth, the ladder upon which God’s angels travel.27 The natural place to look for a rabbinic parallel of this theme is Bereshit Rabba, the earliest rabbinic midrash to Genesis, at the section dealing with the Ladder verses. On the verse ‘and the angels of God were going up and down it’, this midrash comments as follows: R. Hiyya Rabbah and R. Yannai: one said, ascending and descending on the ladder, and the other said ascending and descending on Jacob! The one who said ascending and descending the ladder is easily understood. But the one who said ascending and descending on Jacob [what does this mean?] . . .28 ‘Israel in whom I glory’ (Isaiah 49:3). You are the one whose image (Hebrew: ekonin) is engraved on high. They ascend and see his image; descend and see him asleep. This can be compared to a king who was sitting in judgment in the colonnade. They go up to the basilica and nd him asleep; go down to the colonnade and nd him sitting in judgment. (par. 68).

‘Ascending and descending on Jacob’ is a striking parallel to ‘the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man’ in the John passage,29 too striking to be a coincidence of independent composition.30 Who, then, inuenced whom? Burney, who noted the similarity of the two passages, did not take a stand on the question of their mutual relationship. In the tradition of scholars who standardly saw rabbinic motifs as antecedent to their NT parallels, Odeberg declared that

27 Besides the vivid similarity of ascending and descending between heaven and earth, the very phrase ‘the angels of God’, not at all common in the NT (see Luke 12, 8 and following only) is an additional link between John and Genesis. 28 I defended the suggestion that the brief elided passage is an insert borrowed from its parallel and is not original to this context. 29 Burney (Burney, 1922, 116) studying John, was the earliest author I have found connecting these two passages. Indeed, after observing the obvious similarity to Genesis 28, 12, Bereshit Rabba on that verse is a natural place to check for rabbinic discussions, vise versa however; it would hardly be obvious. 30 On the general phenomenon see B. Wimpfheimer, ‘An Unlikely Source: Sanhedrin 19a–b and Josephus Revisited’ (forthcoming) with reference to my approach elsewhere.

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the nondependence of the rabbinic theme upon the NT passage was beyond question,31 and a similar approach was regularly adopted by later writers, who saw the NT passage as representing the inuence of a rabbinic midrash like the one in Bereshit Rabba.32 In this context I wish to call into question the general assumption that a NT parallel to a Jewish motif is always to be taken as the ‘borrower’ and not as the ‘lender’. Regarding the two passages under study here, we can point to specic chronological and contextual support. The book of John was composed between approx. 90–100 CE; R. Hiyya Rabbah and R. Yannai functioned in tandem at the beginning of the third century CE, and Bereshit Rabba was compiled in about the fth or sixth century.33 Jewish-Christian dialogue regarding the

31 ‘That the latter did not derive the interpretation in question from Jn or from Christian exegesis needs no demonstration’ (o.c., 35). 32 Menahem Kister (Kister, 1994, 19–20) postulated the existence of an unrecorded early mystical midrash, already misunderstood by Bereshit Rabba: ‘If we were to have to understand what is said in the Christian source in light of the text of the Hebrew Bible that underlies it, we would explain that the later source rests upon a mystical midrash on Jacob’s dream. Such a midrash, describing the Son of Man as a mythical heavenly gure, seems possible in the special mystic atmosphere of the Gospel of John, but very strange and improper in the context of rabbinic midrashim as we know them. Yet it seems to me that the original saying known to us from Genesis Rabbah should be explained by that same daring and mystical interpretation, although it is doubtful whether those who transmitted the tradition recorded in Genesis Rabbah understood its full meaning.’ 33 The problem was raised by Morgen (Morgen, 1993, 13) quoting Boismard: ‘Enn, on peut ajouter que cette exégèse interéssante faite à partir des midrashim doit néanmoins rester discrète pour l’ interprétation de Jn 1,51, car, comme le fait remarquer M.-E. Boismard, ‘les deux rabbins, dont on rapporte ici les paroles appartenaient à la première generation des Amoraï, et vivaient donc dans la première moitié du troisième siècle’. Christopher Rowland is aware of the problem but wagers on forced assumptions: ‘The problem with this passage from Ber. R., as with so many others from rabbinic collections, is that in its present form it cannot be dated with any certainty before the third century A.D. Thus we cannot be sure that it was in fact in existence at the time of writing of the Fourth Gospel. This criticism is not as weighty as is often supposed, however. One cannot deny that the basis for such an interpretation already existed in the ambiguity of the Masoretic Text itself. Although the evidence that such an interpretation was in existence in the rst century is not available, it would seem to be a reasonable assumption that, in the light of the sophistication of exegetical methods practised by Jewish interpreters, this ambiguity would have been exploited to the full from a very early time’ (Rowland, 1984, 501). He similarly struggles with the Targumim, which we feel are certainly dependent on Bereshit Rabbah. He writes ‘There are many problems with the dating of targumic material, for it cannot be doubted that the most elaborate of the targumim to the Pentateuch, Pseudo-Jonathan, did not reach its nal form until well into the Islamic period. Nevertheless few would deny that this late targum and the others do contain relics of very ancient Jewish exegesis . . . it would appear that this

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midrashic interpretation of Scripture was a reality in the third century and even earlier (Urbach, 1988, 521; Hirshman, 1992, 7). ‘And the angels of God go up and down on it (Hebrew bo)’, is homiletically explained in both sources under study here as ‘on him’, a legitimate meaning of bo. In John this homiletical meaning is applied naturally and literally: the angels ascend and descend upon him, that is to say, upon Jesus, who becomes the ladder himself, connecting heaven and earth—simple, and direct. By contrast, the application of this interpretation in Bereshit Rabba is forced, articial, and even obtuse. The angels are not ascending and descending on Jacob, but rather on the ladder, as in the biblical verse. They ‘ascend and see his image; descend and see him asleep’. Only in this sense, according to the midrash, are they ‘ascending and descending on Jacob’. This extreme articiality can be explained if we see the Bereshit Rabba presentation of this midrash as a secondary usage, taken from its original context in John or another similar source, and reapplied. The reapplication refrains from making Jacob himself the connecting ladder between heaven and earth, but in effect produces an even more daring construction. However, we must elucidate the exact meaning of the midrash we quoted from Bereshit Rabba (see p. 170) before we return to explicate this point. The angelic travelers ascend and see Jacob’s image engraved on high; they descend and see him asleep. The sage who held that the angels ascended and descended ‘upon Jacob’ meant that when they ascended to heaven the angels saw Jacob there, and when they descended to earth they saw Jacob there also. This situation is exemplied by a king-parable, ostensibly drawn from a real-life situation of the Roman world, where the citizens seem to nd the king in two places at one and the same time. In one he sits as judge in court; in the other he is asleep. Whether this feat was accomplished by a stunt using a hidden passageway, using a double in one of the two locations, or perhaps a dummy in the bed, we can assume that both the homiletist and his audience were quite familiar with a ‘double vision of the king’ motif, and therefore for them the parable was able to serve the homily well. How are we to understand the angels seeing Jacob’s image engraved ‘on high’ while at the same time seeing him asleep below? Notwithstanding the various previous explanations that have been applied to

interpretation is presupposed by the passage in Ber. R. 68. 12, for the latter seems to be a development of the version found in the targumim’ (Rowland, 1984, 502–3).

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this passage,34 it is clear to us that the two beings that they saw were the Divine Presence above—as indeed the Ladder passage in the Bible indicates: ‘And the Lord was standing above him/it’ (Gen. 28.13)—and Jacob sleeping below. The two were as identical to the angels as the double vision of the king in the parable (or as the angelically perceived identity of Adam and the Creator, recounted in Bereshit Rabba 8, p. 63). Jacob’s image being engraved ‘on high’ means that it is engraved upon the visage of the Divine Presence, ‘on High’ (‘l’ma’ala’) being a not uncommon epithet for God Himself !35 This interpretation is supported by the parallel to this midrash in the Babylonian Talmud. It reads: ‘They ascend and behold the image on high; they descend and behold the image below’ (Hullin 82b), without ‘engraved.’ The simple meaning (contrary to the commentators) is that ‘on high’ here is an instance of the standard use of this phrase as an epithet for God. There is a Talmudic passage that registers similarity of visage regarding famous biblical and rabbinic personalities, in chronological retrospect: ‘The beauty of R. Kahana was like the beauty of Rav, the beauty of Rav was like the beauty of R. Abbahu, the beauty of R. Abbahu was like the beauty of Father Jacob, the beauty of our Father Jacob was like the beauty of Adam, the beauty of Adam was like the beauty of the Divine Presence’! (Bava Batra 58a; Bava Metzia 84a).36 Comparing the beauty of Adam to the Divine Presence is an elaboration of the biblical theme that man was created in the image of God. According to the rabbinic tradition, that image was passed on to Adam’s descendents in a general sense,37 while the exact ‘spit and

34 Which were rather unanimous is seeing the eikon engraved on the throne, in light of this theme within the midrashic corpus itself. See my ‘Graven’ in detail. 35 The possibility of such an interpretation was anticipated by Rowland, in the form of a question: ‘Nevertheless the great signicance which is attached to the disclosure of the ascent of the angels suggests something even more important. That could only be the climax of the apocalyptic ascent, the glimpse of God in glory (Rev. 4. 2; 1 Enoch 14. 20; Slav. Enoch 22). In the light of this it has to be asked whether the targumim here hint that Jacob’s features were in fact identical with the form of God on the throne of glory (Ezek. 1. 26f.)’ (p. 504). He does not mention the traditional explanation, engraved on the throne which is of course the main obstacle to be overcome in order to arrive at this position, which we feel is correct. 36 According to the manuscript readings. Several editions eliminated the last link. 37 In contrast to the Christian doctrine indicating that the image of God was lost by Adam (and maintained only by Jesus).

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image’,38 with identical facial features, was inherited by a select few, the rst of whom was Jacob. We have hereby recovered early evidence corroborating our interpretation of ‘engraved on High.’ There was a specic tradition that included Jacob in a list of humans whose countenance preserved the exact features that the Creator gave to Adam, making them as indistinguishable from Him as was Adam in the eyes of the angels. The extension of this list to representatives of the Talmudic sages themselves is a touching addition, connecting the exceptional personalities of later ages to biblical gures in an iconic genealogy.39 The earlier form of this equation of identities, however, clearly included biblical personalities only, or, to be more precise, Adam and Jacob only! It was they, and they alone, who possessed the beauty of the countenance of the Creator Himself. This aggadic tradition recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, and our passage regarding the ekonin of Jacob, shed light upon each other. The Creator said, ‘I will make man in My image, after My likeness’ (Gen. 1:26). The divine image is engraved upon humanity. We can now add that midrashic doctrine applied this to physiognomy as well! However, the exact lineaments of the divine visage were passed on by Adam to Jacob only, and thus it can be said that the image of Jacob is the same as that engraved on the countenance of the Divine Presence. An unexpected corroboration of this interpretation can be derived from the following Hekhalot text: It was said about the High Priest R. Ishmael ben Elisha40 that he was one of the seven most handsome men who ever lived, these being: Adam, Jacob, Joseph, Saul, Absalom, R. Abahu, and R. Ishmael (Midrash of the Ten Martyrs) (Eisenstein, 1915, 445).

The presence of R. Abbahu is incontrovertible evidence of the dependence of this passage on the Talmudic tradition cited above. The Hek-

38 ‘Spit and image’ was the original form of ‘spitting image’, ‘spit’ meaning ‘the exact likeness’ (see Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Springeld 1994, p. 867). 39 The grafting of the talmudic sages onto the biblical genealogy is, for example, reminiscent of medieval grafting of the French royal house onto biblical monarchal genealogy on the stained glass windows of the Saint Chapel in Paris. 40 Although mentioned in talmudic literature, it has long been noted that a priest of this name is not directly recorded in Second Temple literature, although separate components appear in one form or another. See most recently, M. Benovitz, 2006 (Hebrew with English summaries).

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halot passage revamps the talmudic list with the transparent purpose of including Ishmael, the ‘High Priest’ hero of hekhalot literature. If this weren’t enough, a second passage from Midrash of the Ten Martyrs makes the issue crystal clear: ‘R. Ishmael puried himself through immersions and ablutions, wrapped himself in prayershawl and phylacteries, and explicitly pronounced the ineffable name. Immediately the spirit carried him and brought him up to the sixth rmament, where he met the Angel Gabriel. He said to him, ‘Are you the Ishmael in whom the Creator prides Himself each day, saying that He has a servant on earth whose looks are like His facial features?’. He responded, ‘I am he’ (Eisenstein, 1915, 440).

Despite attempts both by medievals and moderns to avoid the clear anthropomorphic message of the Jacob’s Ladder passage in Bereshit Rabba, our conclusion is inescapable, both in light of the simple meaning of the passage itself, and the more explicit later parallels. Just as the idea of explaining ‘ascending and descending upon it’ to mean upon him, seems to be is taken from a source like the Gospel of John (bo = upon him/it), so the entire thrust of the midrash itself may be a rabbinic response to the NT claim that Jesus assumed the status of God’s rst-born son and was the sole carrier of the image of God: Giving thanks unto the Father, which has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. Who has delivered us from the power of darkness, and has translated [us] into the kingdom of his dear Son. In whom we have redemption through his blood, [even] the forgiveness of sins. Who is the image of the invisible God, the rstborn of every creature (Colossians 1, 12–15). And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to [his] purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the rstborn among many brethren (Romans 8:28–29).

The plural in Genesis 1, 26 ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ was interpreted as God speaking to Jesus, anticipating his features and reecting them in the creation of Adam.41 41 ‘When God said ‘let us make man in our image’ Genesis 1:26, He was not speaking to another person in the godhead. He was looking forward 4,000 years to the birth of Jesus Christ. Jesus was the image or body of that invisible God, Col. 1:15’ (www. keytotheendtimerevival.com/wasjesuscreated.html). Rabbinic sources also struggled with the meaning of the plural in Gen. 1, 26: R. Samuel b. Nahman said in R. Jonathan’s name: When Moses was engaged in writing the Torah, he had to write the work of each day. When he came to the verse, AND GOD SAID: LET US MAKE MAN, etc.,

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Christian doctrine claimed the birthright of rst-born and the image of God for Jesus (Kittel, vol. 2., 395–6).42 However, the Hebrew scriptures declare: ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, Israel is my rst-born son’ (Exodus 4, 22). It is not surprising then that Jacob/Israel as God’s chosen, was portrayed in rabbinic teachings as bearing the divine image in a unique sense, including exact facial features—the ‘spit and image’ of his Creator. A polemic with the Christian doctrine supplies the rational for this innovative midrash, reading into the text much more than the transference of the angelic trafc upon Jacob demanded. Jesus was said to sit at God’s right hand,43 but Jacob himself is the identical child of His eternal image. LITERATURE Primary literature Maimonides, Responsa, ed. Blau, Jerusalem 1960. Mishnah Commentary by Maimonides. Mishnah: im Perush Rabbenu Mosheh ben Maimon, ed. Jerusalem, 1963. Oxford MS 2289, fol. 43a. The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan, translated from the Hebrew by Judah Goldin, New Haven, 1955. Otzar Ha-Midrashim. Ed. J.D. Eisenstein, New York, 1915. Secondary literature Abrams, D., ‘The Boundaries of Divine Ontology; the Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead’, in Harvard Theological Review 87 (1994) 291–321.

he said: ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Why dost Thou furnish an excuse to heretics?’. ‘Write!’ replied He; ‘whoever wishes to err may err’ (Bereshit Rabba 8). The explanation, among several, provided there, is that God spoke to the ministering angels. The concern with the fact that the verse may be used in support of sectarian doctrines is explicit, and thus the polemical nature of this discussion. 42 The concepts were already tied together by Philo: ‘but they who have real knowledge, are properly addressed as the sons of the one God, as Moses also entitles them, where he says, ‘Ye are the sons of the Lord God’ (Deut. 14, 1). And again, ‘God who begot Thee’ ( 32, 18) and in another place, ‘Is not he thy father?’ (32, 6) . . . And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his rst-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees, ‘Israel’ . . . For even if we are not yet suitable to be called the sons of God, still we may deserve to be called the children of his eternal image, of his most sacred word; for the image of God is his most ancient word’ (On the Confusion of Tongues, 145–47). 43 Romans 6, 34; Acts 2, 33 (see v. 25; originally reading mymynv in Psalms 16, 8).

8. anthropomorphism and its eradication

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Avishur, Y., ‘Who Has Measured the Waters in the Hollow of his Hand (Isaiah 40: 12)’, in Tecuda 2 (1982), 131–38. Bernard, J.H., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to John, Edinburgh, 1928. Boyarin, D., ‘Two Introductions to the Midrash on the Song of Songs’, in Tarbiz 56 (1987), 479–500. Brown, R.E., The Gospel According to John (i–xii), Garden City, 1966 (The Anchor Bible). Burney, C.F., The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel, Oxford, 1922. Cohen, M.S., ‘Shicur Qomah’, The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, Oxford, 1997. ———, The Shi{ur Qomah: liturgy and theurgy in pre-Kabbalistic Jewish mysticism, Lanham, Md., 1983. ———, The Shiur Qomah: texts and recensions, Tübingen, 1985. Couroyer, B., ‘Isaïe, XL, 12’, in Revue biblique 73 (1966), 186–96. Dan, Y., ‘The Book of the Wise’ by One of the Pietists of Ashkenaz’ (Hebrew), in Kobez Al Yad 6 (1966), 197–223. Dodd, C.H., The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge, 1958. Friedländer, M. (tr.), The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, London, 1942. Friedman, S., ‘Graven Images’, in: Graven Images, A Journal of Culture, Law and the Sacred, I (1994), 233–238. ———, ‘Image, Likeness, and Form’ (Hebrew), in Sidra 22 (2007) in press. Geest, P. van, ‘Augustine’s Thoughts On How God May Be Represented’, in: W. van Asselt, P. van Geest, D. Müller, T. Salemink (ed.), Iconoclasm and Iconoclash. Struggle for Religious Identity. Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2007. Grifn C.W., Paulsen, D.L., ‘Augustine and the Corporeality of God’, in HTR 95 (2002), 97–118. Gruenwald, I., Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, Leiden, 1980. ———, ‘The Impact of Priestly Traditions on the Creation of Merkabah Mysticism and the Shiur Komah’ (Hebrew), in Proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of Jewish Mysticism, Early Jewish Mysticism = Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6 (1987), 65–120. Halkin, A. Hartman, D., Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, Philadelphia, 1985 [texts translated and notes by Abraham Halkin; discussions by David Hartman]. Hirshman, M., Mikra and Midrash. A Comparison of Rabbinics and Patristics, Tel Aviv, 1992 (Hebrew). Kister, M., ‘Observations on Aspects of Exegesis, Tradition and Theology in Midrash, Pseudoepigrapha, and other Jewish Writings’, in Tracing the Thread, Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudoepigrapha, ed. J.C. Reeves, Atlanta, 1994, 1–34. Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., (ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, 1965–74. vol. 2. Kugel, J., In Potiphar’s House: the Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts, New York, 1990. Liebermann, S., Shkiin: a Few Words on some Jewish Legends, Customs and Literary Sources found in Karaite and Christian Works, Jerusalem, 1939, 1952. Lorberbaum, Y., Image of God, Halakhah and Aggadah (Hebrew), Jerusalem-Tel Aviv, 2004. Milikowsky, Ch., ‘Rabbinic Interpretation of the Bible in the Light of Ancient Hermeneutical Practice: The Question of the Literal Meaning,’ in M. Perani (ed.), The Words Of A Wise Mouth Are Gracious, Divre Pi-Hakam Hen: Festschrift for Günter Stemberger on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, Berlin 2005, 7–28 (Studia Judaica 32). Morgen, M., ‘La promesse de Jésus à Nathanaël ( Jn 1, 51) éclairée par la hagaddah de Jacob-Israël’, in Revue des sciences religieuses, 67 (1993), 1–21. Odeberg, H., The Fourth Gospel; interpreted in its relation to contemporaneous religious currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental world, Uppsala [1929].

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Qah, J., ‘A Remnant of an Ancient Yemenite Composition Regarding Shiur Qomah’, in id., Ketavim, I, Jerusalem, 1989, 475–78. Rowland, Ch., ‘John 1.51, Jewish Apocalyptic and Targumic Tradition’, in New Testament Studies 30 (1984), 498–507. Scholem, G.G., Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic tradition, New York, 1960. ———, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York, 1941. Shapiro, M., Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox, Scranton, 2006. Weinfeld, M., ‘God the Creator in Gen. I and in the Prophesy of Second Isaiah’ (Hebrew), in Tarbiz 37 (1968), 105–132.

9. AUGUSTINE’S THOUGHTS ON HOW GOD MAY BE REPRESENTED Paul van Geest (University of Tilburg; Free University of Amsterdam) Introduction In the years 385–386 Augustine’s reading of the Latin translation of the works of Plotinus and Porphyry by Marius Victorinus instigated by his association with bishop Ambrose of Milan, brought about a rst important change in his life (Cf. Gilson, 1980, 126). Plotinus’ conception of evil as ‘absence of being’, for example, released him from a dualistic world in which matter was seen as hostile and contrary to God. Neoplatonism also taught him that interiorization and purication stimulated the growth of self-knowledge and, consequently, the knowledge of God. In addition, he realized that awareness of God as the cause of being and knowing was closely related to morality. To these insights he would cling during his life time (See f.i. De ciuitate Dei 8.4). But most of all, the Latin translations of Plotinus and Porphyry provided him with the idea that for all things that exist, the intelligible world was the ground of being and knowing: God was purely a spiritual, immaterial substance (Confessiones 6.4; 7.1.1.), something like an endless sea (Confessiones 7.1.2; 7.5.7) and, consequently, unknowable. Plotinus thought that nothing was left for man but to keep silent, because the spoken word would do more injustice than justice to the absolute divine reality. Accordingly, Augustine’s commitment to an ascetic life implying a disengagement from earthly affairs can be deduced from this conception of God: to remain sensitive and open for God, the human beings ought to become as spiritual as was possible for them. During this process they discovered God to be unknowable. Plotinus opened Augustine’s eyes for the impossibility of putting into words the divine essence and actions. Yet Augustine did not fancy the idea to leave God’s mystery such a mystery that no one understood any longer that there even was a mystery. Therefore, he felt obliged to speak about God. In this regard he preferred Plato’s approach maintaining that man should not keep silent about God but should try to evoke a sense

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of the divine essence by speaking in terms of goodness, truth and beauty that were conceivable for humankind. Simultaneously, Plato did emphasize that God is goodness in an absolute sense and that this goodness cannot be grasped in this world. In a certain sense, Plato articulated the concept of ‘removal’: all sensory or corporeal perceptions and denitions must be dropped and ruled out in order to become aware of God as the simplest spiritual and absolute being. (De Rijk, 2004). So, Augustine’s appreciation of (Neo)platonism as a companion to Christianity was also motivated by his conviction that the Platonists had rightly understood that it was impossible for something material and mutable to be God.1 In spite of his high esteem for the Platonists, his increasing familiarity with Holy Scripture also implied a discontinuity in continuity with Platonism regarding his experience of God. As thinker formed by Neo-platonic ideas and almost a Christian, Augustine stated in his early work De ordine that the best way to know Him is by not knowing Him (De ordine 2.16.44) and that the only thing the soul knows of its maker is that it does not know Him (ibid. 2.18.47; Carabine, 1992). In his Confessiones, written during the time he was a bishop, he seems to suggest that every representation of the purely spiritual and ineffable God in philosophical reections or in metaphorical language is an infringement of the divine reality.2 At the same time, however, he addresses God as a personal God: a God who personally interfered in the history of the people of Israel, who could be furious, jealous, patient and compassionate: a personal God, who interfered in his own history and whose light provided him with a new self-understanding.3 Being aware of a possible resulting dualism between God and world, the innite and 1 ‘Viderunt ergo isti philosophi, . . . nullum corpus esse Deum, et ideo cuncta corpora transcenderunt quaerentes Deum. Viderunt, quidquid mutabile est, non esse summum Deum, et ideo animam omnem mutabilesque omnes spiritus transcenderunt quaerentes summum Deum’, De ciuitate Dei 8.6. Madec, 1996, 315, 333, 342 rightly presumes rather the incorporation of the Platonic vision of God into the Biblical. 2 ‘Non te cogitabam, deus, in gura corporis humani, ex quo audire aliquid de sapientia coepi’, Confessiones. 7.1.1; ‘Et quicquid tibi, cum ista cogitas, corporeae similitudinis occurerit, abnue, nega, respue, abice, fuge’, Epistula 120, 13. 3 Cf. The continuous form of prayer in the Confessiones , the description of God’s unknowingness and presence at the same time: ‘Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo’, Confessiones 3.6.11, and Madec, 1996, 314–315, 317, 347–49 for several indications in which it becomes clear that Augustine articulates the various ways of God’s presence and acting by using the example of human experience and its memory regarding the working of various bodily parts.

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 181 nite, Augustine, in his Confessiones and many other works, made use of biblical symbols and anthropomorphisms in order to formulate his view on the ideal relationship between God and mankind. In this contribution, therefore, we will try to answer the question of how Augustine’s negative propositions about God relate to his metaphorical and anthropomorphic language about God. What sort of language about God is most important to him and what is the reason for this? For the sake of clarity, it should be noticed that the present essay only focuses on Augustine’s conception of ‘verbal images’ and not on his perception of material images. For it may be safely assumed that Augustine’s ideas concerning verbal images inuenced his view on material images. In what follows it shall become clear that, for Augustine, too much emphasis on a concrete representation of God in word and thought would be altogether wrong. In my view, this train of thought determined Augustine’s ideas about the material imagination of God (Cf. Latour, 2002, 14–37). Therefore, this introductory survey is focused on Augustine’s view on verbal images and does not discuss his view on material images. This is due to fact that his view on material images was determined by his view on verbal images, not the other way around. In discussing some key-passages in Augustine’s writings both context and chronology are being considered. 4 In this way an attempt is made to present a rst and exploring outline of the developments and main points of Augustine’s thoughts regarding the representation of God. It is obvious that in this contribution it is impossible to discuss all the passages (55.000!), in which Augustine deals with the ousia of the Trinity, the homoousia of the divine Persons, the divine attributes, the incarnation or the economy of salvation (Madec, 1996). In chronological order, only those passages will be reviewed in which Augustine himself discusses the problem of divine representation.

4 For a more detailed study of Augustine’s conception of speaking about God and his imagination of God, see: Van Geest, 2006, and esp. Van Geest, 2007 for further bibliography.

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Although Augustine in his twenties did not yet think of God as purely immaterial and spiritual—as was the case in his Milan period in his thirties—it appeared that he, like many young intellectuals of his days had a strong aversion to the primitive anthropomorphisms used in the Bible. It was connected with an aversion to anthropomorphic articulation of the experience of God in the cultural climate of that time, especially, in the Catholic culture (See Teske, 1986, 253–268; Paulsen, 1990; Paffenroth, 1993; Paulsen, 1993; Grifn-Paulsen, 2002). Augustine was attracted to the intellectual approach of the Manichees to the teaching of Christ.5 The rationality of their approach, for example, was evident in their view on creation (creation was not ex nihilo) and in their conception of evil, that was seen as parallel and contrary to God. If God was seen as creator of all things, then it would logically follow that evil in some way or another was related to the good God of the New Testament, which was rejected as an absurd idea. Because in their view the created world was a mixture of good and evil, light and darkness, they considered the Old Testament Creator God as the embodiment of this evil principle. Their aversion to this God and his anthropomorphic representations of their time was evident in their cynical interpretation of Gen. 1:26 (‘Let us make man to our image and likeness’). Perhaps this God, they suggested, may have nostrils, teeth and a beard, or even internal organs.6

5 Cf. his criticisms of the Manicheos in his retrospect De utilitate credendi 14.31: ‘Si enim turpe est sine ratione cuiquam credere, quid exspectas, quid satagis, ut alicui sine ratione credam, quo facilius tua ratione duci possim?’ 6 ‘Istam maxime quaestionem solent Manichaei loquaciter agitare, et insultare nobis quod hominem credamus factum ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei. Attendunt enim guram corporis nostri, et infeliciter quaerunt utrum habeat Deus nares et dentes et barbam, et membra etiam interiora, et caetera quae in nobis sunt necessaria. In Deo autem talia ridiculum est, imo impium credere, et ideo negant hominem factum esse ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei. Quibus respondemus, membra quidem ista in Scripturis plerumque nominari, cum Deus insinuatur audientibus parvulis; et hoc non solum in Veteris Testamenti libris, sed etiam in Novi. Nam et oculi Dei commemorantur, et aures, et labia, et pedes, et ad dexteram Dei Patris sedere evangelizatur Filius. . . . Sed omnes qui spiritaliter intellegunt Scripturas, non membra corporea per ista nomina, sed spiritales potentias accipere didicerunt. . . .’ De Genesi contra Manicheos 1.17.27. Cf. Pelland, 1972, 17–22. For a general introduction to Augustine’s three commentaries on Genesis, see: Hill, O’Connel, Fiedrowicz, Rotelle, 2002, 13–22. Cf. for the development of Augustine’s view of humanity and God in the commentaries on Genesis: Pelland, 1992, 15–53.

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 183 The above mentioned libri platonicorum convinced Augustine that God was pure spirit who could not be thought of in terms of matter, time or space (Confessiones 3.7.12; 5.14.25). Ambrose’s allegorical method of reading the Bible of Ambrose was a clear indication for Augustine that the Catholic faith did not teach God that has the shape of a human body. He also recognized that the creation of the human being to the likeness of God should not be taken in a literal-anthropomorphic sense. After his return in Thagaste in 388 or 389, he immediately embarked on writing his rst commentary on Genesis, De Genesi contra Manicheos.7 First of all, this work is apologetic in character. Applying the Plotinian principle that evil is absence of being, he refutes the Manichean conception of evil by describing it as a deciency of goodness, as darkness is a deciency of light. (De Genesi contra Manicheos 1.4.7). In this way he arrives at the optimistic conclusion that the world created by God out of nothing is potentially ‘good’. In this respect he departs from Neoplatonism. But his idea that the free-willed aversio a Deo was the beginning of the deciency of goodness, was again a Platonic device.8 Secondly, De Genesi contra Manicheos was also a catechetical treatise through which Augustine wanted to instruct the ‘weaker brethren and the little ones’ ( parvuli): illiterate and the catechumens, who were inuenced by the anthropomorphic God experience of the North African Church and who were unable to think of God in terms of a purely immaterial entity (De Genesi contra Manicheos 1.1.2; cf. De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus Manicheorum 1.17). With the Manicheans Augustine shared the opinion that anthropomorphisms were expressions of pueritia mentis (Madec, 1996, 314–315, 322). But he rejects as ‘ridiculous’ their interpretation—recorded by Augustine himself—that God, therefore, must have teeth, if humankind is created to his likeness. He recognizes that bodily parts such as God’s eyes, ears, lips and feet are indeed frequently mentioned in the scriptures. Nevertheless he blames the Manichees that they, rst of all, ridicule the Old Testament anthropomorphisms without realizing that they likewise occur in the New Testament. Secondly, he reproaches them for their defective hermeneutics: if they had accepted the Ambrosian allegorical method, then they could have learned that these anthropomorphic

7 On the date of De Genesi contra Manicheos see De Genesi ad litteram 8.2 and Retractationes 1.10.1. 8 Cf. for the ‘creatio ex nihilo’: De Genesi contra Manicheos 1.2.4.; 1.6.10–1.7.11.

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names were not meant as an indication of parts of the body, but referred to the spiritual powers of God (Pollmann, 1996, 11–21). Augustine concludes his argument by referring to the passage in Scripture in which man is said to be made in the image of God: This is said with reference to the interior man, where reason is to be found and intelligence . . . not to the body that man was made to God’s image, but to the power by which he surpasses all cattle, all animals.9

This small quotation clearly reveals Augustine’s departure from Manicheism as well as the inuence of his new hermeneutics, and the impact of Neo-Platonism. First of all, he does not put the human beings and the animal kingdom in the order of creation outside or against God, but relates them both to the good Creator. Later on he will argue more explicitly that every being in the order of creation is to be seen as a reference and praise to God. But, here, he already avoids Manichean dualism between God and world, the innite and nite. Secondly, here one perceives the hermeneutics of Ambrose, who—in the words of Augustine—presented a justication for understanding the words of Scripture as gurae or allegoria, if a ‘literal’ interpretation of the words leads to blasphemy.10 Thirdly, the Neo-platonic world view is echoed in Augustine’s words that the image of God should be interpreted in a pure spiritual way. During this stage of his life Augustine does not unconditionally opt for negative speech about God or for an absolute silence regarding God. He could have done so in reaction to the anthropomorphic popular culture and the Manichean cynicism on this subject. He actualizes God’s being and acting through using the image of God as a metaphor for God’s spiritual powers. Although critical to the cynical outgrowths of the biblical anthropomorphisms, he does not reject them unless they are not used as referring to a corporeal reality. They can be used as metaphor or allegory in order to evoke an awareness of God as a purely spiritual entity. Some decades later it appears that for Augustine the anthropomorphic Catholic popular culture and, especially, the inability of his parvuli 9 De Genesi contra Manicheos 1.17.28. Translation taken from Hill, 2002, 56–57, where the references can be found to the relevant passages in Scripture. Cf. the contribution of Marcel Poorthuis in this volume. 10 De Genesi contra Manicheos 1.2.3. He sometimes also uses ‘gura’ (1.13.19), ‘allegoria’ (1.22.39), ‘aenigma’ (2.2.3), ‘imago’ (1.17.28), ‘similitudo’ (1.13.19), ‘mysterium’ (1.3.5.), ‘sacramentum’ (1.22.23), ‘signum’ (1.8.14), ‘velum’ (1.22.33).

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 185 to think of God as a non-corporeal or non-material entity, is still a source of great concern. In 413 (or 415–16) he delivered four sermons on three consecutive days in Carthago, probably in Faustus’ basilica near the church yard, in which he expresses this concern.11 In the second, sermo 23, Augustine, referring to Psalm 73:23 (‘Thou hast holden me by my right hand’) wonders what to do with the materialistic hearer, who presumes that God appears in a human shape and ‘that the nature and substance of God have distinct parts and limbs, a denite shape, a nite quantity, a place to stay in’ (23.5). He does not hesitate to call the idea that God is a corporeal entity a destructive and ruinous lie (sermo 23.5). The prayer in Psalm 139:7–8, suggesting that God can be met in heaven as well in hell, is a clear indication for Augustine that it is impossible to think of God as a material entity: it endorses the idea that God is really a pure spiritual reality (sermo 23, 6). He proceeds with the cynical remark that the parvulus will gather in temples and mountains in order to seek and nd God. His remark that Solomon’s temple is too small for God may have been quite shocking to the anthropomorphic belief of the parvulus. Instead he states that the parvulus himself has to be a pure temple in which God can be received was: Let him be a temple himself, and God will visit him (23.6) . . . The heart of the believer is not too small for him, though the temple of Solomon was (23.7) . . . But why were you trying to make plenty of room for him? Let the lodger himself make more room: For the love of Christ has been spread in our hearts . . . Through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.12

Augustine’s deconstruction of the material conception of God, therefore, involves a call to interiorization and inner purity. In this he clearly shows himself to be a disciple of Plotinus. At the end of sermo 23 he reiterates his statement that seeing God is only possible with a heart puried by faith, healed by love, and strengthened by peace (sermo 23.18). Therefore, it is not the concrete, material representation of God but the inner disposition, which brings about sensitivity for meeting God in a temple which is the human being himself. In his Praeceptum, written in 397, and in De ciuitate Dei, started in 410, Augustine emphasizes the idea that every individual believer as well as the community of 11 sermo 111 was held on 19 januari, sermo 23 on January 20, sermo 53 on the feast of Saint Agnes on January 21st, and sermo 277 on January 22nd, the feastday of St Vincent. Cf. St. Augustine, Sermons II = Hill, Rotelle, 1991, 45. 12 sermo 23.7; cf. sermo 23.8 Translation taken from Hill, 1991.

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believers together are God’s temple, because ‘God wants to dwell in the harmony of all and in every single person.’ (De ciuitate Dei 10.3; cf. sermo 53.7). In sermo 23 it seems that Augustine presupposes in his parvuli the same unability to value metaphorical language as with the Manicheans twenty years earlier. He hastens to say that the sentence: ‘They will get drunk in the abundance of your house (23.12) should not be interpreted literally but should be considered as a ‘lavish enjoyment without telling (sermo 23.12.). In order to indicate God as a spiritual and an all-embracing reality, he compares Him with human love which is like a drink: one recognizes love when it comes, but one cannot say exactly which part of the body contains this love.13 In the sermon of the following day, sermo 53, Augustine elaborates on these insights.14 As a result of Matt. 5:8 (‘Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God’) and 1 Cor. 13:12 (‘For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face’) he thunders, rst of all, against the delusion that in the visio beatica God can be seen in the same manner as one sees today a human gure (53.7). He also thunders against the idea that the human being is already able to see God in a mirror which only reects his own visible human face (53.12). In line with this argument he rejects the representation of God as immense extension that occupies all space because of its enormous quantity. If God is represented as someone in time or space, then this points to a false image of God: ‘for, something that ends cannot be God.’ (53.12). In an imaginary dialogue with his parvuli, Augustine ridicules their material image of God in a more radical way than in his previous sermon. With reference to the words of the prophet Isaiah that for God heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool (Is. 66:1; cf. De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.17.27) and that God has measured the heavens in the palm of his hand, he wonders in an almost sarcastic voice whether in this case God’s bottom has the same size as the palm of his hand (53.13–14). His conclusion is, of course, that ‘a Christian should be deeply ashamed if he produces such an idol of God’. (53:14).

13 ‘Attende quid biberis. Caritatem bibisti. Si nosti illam Deus caritas est. Si ergo caritatem bibisti, dic mihi in quo loco bibisti . . . Venit ad te, et nosti eam et vides eam. Et non in loco videtur, nec corporalibus oculis quaeritur, ut vehementius ametur’, sermo 23.13. 14 The sermon is published in: Revue Bénédictine 104 (1994), 21–33.

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 187 No wonder, then, that in sermo 53, Augustine connects the task to become a temple of God to true faith in God. The (false) image of God, i.e. the representation of God as a corporeal being, must be destroyed. God’s hand is a symbol of his power; God’s face is his knowledge. And God’s temple is mankind (53.7).15 But faith in God through which the eyes of the human heart are pure enough to see God (53: 10) is related to the right ordo uiuendi. Therefore, Augustine denounces those who are pleased with themselves and their own faith but who, nevertheless, live a bad life. To believe that there is one God is what devils and other impure spirits practice as well; and they will never see God. Following St. Paul, he states that faith is accompanied by hope but it works through love.16 Therefore, God’s breadth, length, height and depth cannot be found by man through imagining all spheres in the universe, but only in the inner self of the human being. Breadth is indicated by good works, length by long-suffering and perseverance. Height is found through expectation of rewards from above (53:16). Augustine concretises this very way of living by associating it with the cross of Christ. The crossbeam on which Christ’s hands were nailed stands for good works and the vertical post on which Christ’s body was xed stands for perseverance (53.16). In sermo 277, the sermon of the next day, Augustine would repeat that God has no body as though he were spatial, to be contained in place, to have parts, halves, thirds, quarters, wholes, but that God is whole everywhere.17 His argument at the end of sermo 53, however, does indicate that he realizes that

15 ‘Dicitur Dei vultus, dicitur Dei brachium, dicitur Dei manus, dicuntur Dei pedes, dicitur Dei sedes, dicitur scabellum pedum eius: sed noli membra humana cogitare. Si vis esse templum veritatis, frange idolum falsitatis. Manus Dei, potentia Dei. Facies Dei, notitia Dei. Pedes Dei, praesentia Dei. Sedes Dei, si vis, tu es. . . . Ubi enim sedem habet Deus, nisi ubi habitat? Ubi autem habitat, nisi in templo suo? Templum enim Dei sanctum est, quod estis vos. Vide ergo quomodo excipias Deum. Spiritus est Deus; in spiritu et veritate oportet adorare Deum (cf. 1 Cor. 3:17; John 4:24), sermo 53.7. 16 ‘Mundat cor des Dei, mundum cor videt Deum. Sed quia ipsa des aliquando ab hominibus, qui se ipsos fallunt, talis determinatur, quasi sufciat tantummodo credere (promittunt enim sibi quidam etiam conspectum Dei regnumque coelorum credentes et male viventes); . . . Ergo tria sunt illa. Necesse est ut in quo est des, quae per dilectionem operatur, speret quod Deus pollicetur. Comes est ergo dei spes. Necessaria quippe spes est, quamdiu non videmus quod credimus; ne forte non videndo et desperando deciamus. . . . Deinde et caritas, qua desideramus, qua pertingere conamur, qua inardescimus, qua esurimus et sitimus. . . . Tolle dem, perit quod credis; tolle caritatem, perit quod agis.’, sermo 23.10. 17 sermo 277.13; sermo 277.18: ‘Deus non videtur in loco, quia non est corpus; quia ubique totus est, quia non in parte minor, et in parte maior est. Hoc rmissime teneamus.’

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conversation with his anthropomorphic parvuli was impossible without using images. He could not always keep harping on the same string of God’s inconceivability. From this it becomes also clear that, in his view, true experience of God did not result from xation on images of God or words about God: true experience of God is brought about by a way of life in which faith is authenticated by a patient and persevering performance of good works. Pure hearts toil and will see God. A representation of God for connoisseurs We already noticed that Augustine in his polemical-catechetical writings and sermons rejects the idea of God as a human being with a beard, teeth and a palm of his hand as big as his bottom. In his Confessiones and De Trinitate he uses quite another language in imagining God. In the rst work, which he started ca. 397, he analysed with ferocious honesty (Peter Brown) and with historical accuracy (P. Courcelle) his past feelings presented as a dialogue with God, with a view to become an open book for himself, for others (esp. the Donatists) and for God. He started De Trinitate around 400–403 and it was not until the years between 420 and 426–427 that he wrote the introduction and the last part of book XII (Hombert, 2000, esp. 45–80). The boundary between De Trinitate and the Confessiones is a ne line. The Confessiones contain more ‘theology’ than one would expect based on the autobiographical expression of vicissitudes and emotions. In the Confessiones as well, the search for God is reported and books XI–XIII even form a step towards De Trinitate. De Trinitate is again more of an account of personal growth than the passages on Arianism and the explanations on Trinitarian unity in essence and equality surmise. But where in the Confessiones, however, the emphasis lies on the searching for self-knowledge, this time, in De Trinitate, Augustine’s intention is not primarily acquiring knowledge of the self but knowledge of God. In his explanations he avoided an appeal to his own authority and made clear that he would be pleased if others could complete his ideas: he even remarks with a disarming charm that he rather reads than writes and that in the process of writing he learned many things he did not know before.18 This time, too, he had a specic audience in mind. The 18 ‘Credant qui volunt malle me legendo quam legenda dictando laborare . . . egoque ipse multa quae nesciebam scribendo me didicisse contear’, De Trinitate 3.1.1. Cf. De

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 189 reason for the delay in writing his De Trinitate, he states, was the fact that only a limited public was interested in the Holy Trinity and that he could reach a broader public through other works (Epistula 169.1.1). In the Confessiones now, Augustine thematizes the representation of God in a famous passage in Book X. In book VII a quote is to be found which forms a good step towards this passage. Here, he attempts to articulate a special experience of God. He writes that outside his mind the eye of his soul noticed an unearthly and immutable light: a light that had created him and which he, at the same time and in a paradoxical way, also experienced in his soul. He proceeds to relate this light to truth, eternity and love: knowledge of love implies knowledge of this light, knowledge of this light means knowledge of eternity and love. Then he addresses this eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity as a Person, i.e. God to whom his desire extends, night and day (Confessiones 7.10.16). It is revealing to see that Augustine expresses God’s being rst of all by using the light metaphor and then goes on to use Neo-platonic abstracta (‘truth’ and ‘eternity’). For human sensory perception light is more imaginable than truth and eternity. By describing light as the essential characteristic of God’s being and by articulating, thereupon, the experience of this light as knowledge of divine eternity, eternity, (like ‘truth’ and ‘love’) becomes much more concrete than by describing God’s being the other way around. Augustine uses the same procedure in book X. But, here, the way he does so is much more daring, when he asks himself whom or what he is loving, when he loves God. In a frequently quoted passage he assesses that, when loving God, he does not love the beauty of the body, the splendour of time, the glittering of light in his earthly eyes, lovely melodies, the smell of owers, perfumes and spices, manna or honey or bodily embraces. Loving God is rather something like a light, the sound of a voice, a certain smell and perfume, an embrace in his inner man: they have eternal value. After satisfaction, for example, the embrace is not released . . . (Confessiones 10.8.6). This articulation of the representation of God is in line with that of Book VII. However, it is more daring, because God’s being is not anymore called to mind by way of philosophical abstracta, but by thrilling sensory perceptions.

Trinitate 1.4.7 en Epistula 143, 2 ‘Ego proinde fateor me ex eorum numero esse conari, qui prociendo scribunt et scribendo prociunt’.

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To be sure, in this respect Augustine is much indebted to the patristic tradition deriving from Origen (Van Bavel, 1997, 144–145). This tradition attributed to man an inner ability to ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’ and ‘tasting’ of spiritual things. Again, Plato’ technique of removal (aphairesis) is resounding in this quotation. In book X of the Confessiones, however, something different is going on. In this book the beauty and joys of this world are brought up by Augustine as a ‘eeting trace or shadow’ and therefore transitory as life itself. Yet, in this specic context which discusses the pursuit of knowledge of beauty (God), he shows more appreciation of the senses and affections than Plotinus, who, on the contrary, propagated a way of life characterized by detachment from the senses and affections (Plotinus, Enneads I 6, 1; I 6, 7–9). So Augustine turns out to show much more renement in obtaining knowledge of God than his indebtedness to the (Neo-) Platonic tradition and patristic methodologies seem to suggest. Although he does not equate experience of God and sensory perception, in his dialogue with God, he nevertheless presupposes that the human being has become completely aware of the beauty of colours, pleasantness of smells; in short: she must have tasted, sensed and smelled them and even—to overstress the evidence as Augustine himself did—may have experienced an embrace in order to be able to imagine Him in some way. For Augustine, therefore, experience of God contains more dimensions than sensory perception. In some sense, Augustine maintains that experience of God may become conceivable and concrete by recollecting with great intensity previous sensory and emotional sensations. In this respect he turns out to be more subtle than his indebtedness to the patristic tradition seems to suggest. To the dualistic and apophatic theologians of his time, this way of relating sensory and affective experiences in order to evoke an inner experience and image of God must have been something like an encroachment of the Divine and the Holy, even a blasphemy. But perhaps this was not the case. For it is through a recollection of sensory perception and affections that Augustine tries to articulate the experience of God as exactly contrary to the rather changeable sensory perception. Nevertheless, Augustine does value human sensory perceptions for tracing inner experience; therefore, he cannot be called a dualist neither an apophatic or aphaeretic thinker in the strict sense.19

19

In his commentary on John’s Gospel, for example, Augustine reminds us of the human neccesity for light, food, and clothing in order that the longing for God, which

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 191 Looked at in the light of his indebtedness to Plato and the patristic tradition, Augustine proves his uniqueness and virtuosity when trying to evoke the experience of God and, at the same time, showing himself to be aware of the inadequacy of his language. The reason is that when he tries to evoke God as a concrete and near God, he uses all human possibilities.20 The articulation of God in De Trinitate What is striking about Augustine’s speaking regarding the imagination or articulation of God in De Trinitate is the fact that, in the beginning of the rst book, he immediately points to what in his view is the wrong procedure, while at the end of the last book (XV) he emphasizes the fact that God is absolutely unknowable, as he had done a few decades before in De ordine. His phrases on the Holy Trinity are literally framed by, and embedded in, textual fragments in which he refers to human incapability (esp. his own) of describing God’s being. One could say: the more elitist his public, the more apophatic or negative his God talk. Already at the beginning of De Trinitate he introduces four groups which in their representation of God despise ‘the principles of faith’. The rst group thinks that it is possible to imagine God in bodily terms on the basis of sensory perception or scientic investigation. In the second group are those who imagine God in terms of the human soul or mind which, though mutable, is sometimes capable of recollection. To the third group belong those who think it is possible to strive to climb above the mutable created universe and give the impression of knowing God, the immutable substance (De Trinitate 1.1.1). From this list he concludes that everyone is a parvulus—not only the simple Catholics with their culturally dened anthropomorphic image of God—a little one, who has to learn that inexpressible reality can only be seen inexpressibly.21 This last remark, however, is something against his own judgment. Because of its human limitations, Augustine argues, Scripture can do no more than stimulate ‘children’s pleasure’, stimulate

always feeds man and envelops him with mortality, is evoked as an equally primary need, In euangelium Ioannis tractatus, tractatus 13.5. 20 Also, the memory of pain, fear, and confusion in bodily ailment Augustine uses to concretise the awareness of the imperfection of man in a spiritual sense as well as the essence and working of God in terms of healing. Cf. P. van Geest, 2002, 29–51. 21 ‘Et ideo est necessaria purgatio mentis nostrae qua illud ineffabile ineffabiliter videri possit’, De Trinitate 1.1.3.

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on the level parvuli can bear to be stimulated, and move the mind of the weak to seek the things that are above, in their own pace and step by step.22 The same intention is also expressed in books XIV and XV at the end of De Trinitate. Here, he sighs for the fact that human beings have to speak about the inexpressible but that the incomprehensibility of what he seeks does not imply that his quest is meaningless.23 The reason for this Augustine presents in book IV: one has to speak because the human heart and his own heart in particular, would otherwise be overwhelmed by false images of God (De Trinitate 4.1.1). His own incapability he articulates in book XV when writing that his insight in the Holy Trinity is ‘more an attempt than an achievement’ (De Trinitate 15.25.45) and that he, in fact, has said nothing worthy to the inexpressible and most high Trinity.24 In the central part of De Trinitate (7.4.7) he even admits that even the most dogmatic formula of God, being one and yet three persons, is a ‘stopgap’ and a ‘last place of refuge’: the best formula possible, but as it seems, still a formula on the level of the ‘infantilia oblectamenta’: ‘And so, for the sake of talking about inexpressible matters, that we may somehow express what we are completely unable to express, our Greek authors talk about one being, three substances, while we Latins talk of one being or substance, three persons, . . .’25

In almost all books of De Trinitate there is a reference to this human incapability to conceive of God in an appropriate manner. Human ability to experience is not enough.26 Therefore, divine manifestation is

22 De Trinitate 1.1.2. Likewise Agustine considers the Symbolum to be ‘lac’ (milk) for the weak, as he reports in the introduction of De de et symbolo (1.1.). 23 ‘Sic enim sunt incomprehensibilia requirenda, ne se existimet nihil invenisse, qui quam sit incomprehensibile quod quaerebat, potuerit invenire. Cur ergo sic quaerit, si incomprehensible comprehendit esse quod quaerit, nisi quia cessandum non est, quamdiu in ipsa incomprehensibilium rerum inquisitione procitur, et melior meliorque t quaerens tam magnum bonum, quod et inveniendum quaeritur, et quaerendum invenitur?’, De Trinitate 15.2.2. Cf. De Trinitate 8.2.3. 24 ‘Verum inter haec quae multa iam dixi, et nihil illius summae Trinitatis ineffabilitate dignum me dixisse audeo proteri, sed conteri potius miricatam scientiam eius ex me invaluisse’, De Trinitate 15.27.50. 25 ‘Itaque loquendi causa de ineffabilibus ut fari aliquo modo possemus quod effari nullo modo possumus dictum est a nostris Graecis una essentia, tres substantiae, a Latinis autem una essentia, vel substantia, tres Personae’, De Trinitate 7.4.7. In De doctrina Christiana 1.16 Augustine states that we can not even say that God is indescribable: denial of denial remains an essential part of the mystery. 26 ‘ut hoc eis fuerit mitti, ad aspectum mortalium in aliqua forma corporea de spiritali secreto procedere’, De Trinitate 3, proemium, 3.

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 193 needed in order to reveal somehow the invisible being of God to mortal people. But no one should identify this sign with God.27 Even human thinking power is too limited: Augustine himself seems anxious to offend God by his scribbling, because he is a weak man, notwithstanding his good intentions (De Trinitate 5.1.1, De Trinitate 5.1.2). All linguistic skills fail to praise God. Language itself is seen as an expression of human poorness (De Trinitate 7.4.9; De Trinitate 7.3.4). Augustine recognizes the usefulness of metaphors or—in a Kantian formulation—symbolic anthropomorphisms, if taken as a reference to another reality.28 Nevertheless the problem remains that the rational and intellectual nature of the human mind is superseded by the uncreated nature that created all natures, great and small (De Trinitate 14.12.16). By consequence there is nothing left for man but faith (De Trinitate 7.6.12; De Trinitate 8.4.6). The fact that God is unknowable, however, does not imply that God is so mysterious that people do not even know that there is a mystery. As in sermo 53, Augustine says in De Trinitate, that as long as the parvulus does not endure solid food but is nurtured by faith and as long as the mind is not enough puried to see the inexpressible, human beings should look up at the Crucied in order to form an true image of God (De Trinitate 1.1.3; De Trinitate 1.12.23; De Trinitate 2.1.2). By assuming the shape of a slave, until the death on the cross (Phil. 2:7 is used frequently) God’s godhead itself was not subjected to change, but he assumed our changeability. In this way Christ became the only true image of God.

27

With regard to the theophanies in the burning bush (Ex. 3:2) the cloud in the desert and the thunder and lightening which accompanied the giving of the law on the mountain (Ex. 19:16), Augustine remarks that the material shape of these things appeared in order to be a sign of something else before disappearing (De Trinitate 2,6,11). But nobody ‘should be so stupid to believe that the smoke, the re, the clouds, the mist . . . is the substance of the Word, the wisdom of God (who is Christ) or the Holy Spirit itself ’ (De Trinitate 2.15.25) Cf. De Trinitate 2.18.35. 28 De Trinitate 8.2.3; De Trinitate 8.4.7. Cf. De Trinitate 5.8.9 and I. Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, § 57, die evenals Augustinus zijn oordeel over God wil beperken tot de verwoording van de verhouding ‘welches die Welt zu einem Wesen haben mag, dessen Begriff selbst auszer aller Erkenntnis liegt, deren wir innerhalb der Welt fähig sind. Denn alsdann eignen wir dem höchsten Wesen keine von den Eigenschaften an sich selbst zu, durch die wir uns die Gegenstände der Erfahrung denken, und vermeiden dadurch den dogmatischen Anthropomorphismus, wir legen sie aber dennoch dem Verhältnisse desselben zur Welt bei und erlauben uns einen symbolischen Anthropomorphismus, der in der Tat nur die Sprache und nicht das Objekt selbst angeht’.

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Secondly, the human being is created in the image of God. For Augustine, this does not mean that, looking at the human being in his physical manifestation, one immediately gets a good impression of God. On the contrary: as in his polemics against the Manichees and his preaching for the parvuli, in De Trinitate, too, he denounces the idea that God is limited by the contour of bodily limbs (De Trinitate 7.7.12. cf. De Trinitate 12.6.7). Being the image of God should in no way be taken in a material sense. According to Augustine, in book VI, the human being is created in the image of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—not in respect to his body, but in respect to his rational mind (De Trinitate 12.6.6.; 12.6.7; In epistolam Ioannis ad Partos 4.9; 8.6). This image (imago), however does not presuppose aequalitas (equality), but similitudo (likeness). If there were equality then it would be possible to know God in a direct way. God, however, dwells in that invisible part of the human mind—including men and women—through which the human being views or consults the eternal principles (De Trinitate 12. 7.12). So, seeing a human, it is impossible to make an image of God. According to Augustine, both God and the human being remain a mystery. It seems that in De Trinitate Augustine has given up the idea, which was current in his day and characteristic of his earlier position, that it is possible for a human being to lose the image of God within him—or herself (Van Bavel, 2005b, 22–23). The ‘human being ‘is’ an image of God, even when he behaves in such a way that he resembles animals. If he really wants to discover the image of God within himself, then he must join the forces of his memory, intellect and will (which are related to each other and yet one being, as in the Trinity) and focus them on God (Miles, 1983, 125–142). The latter contains something of an ethical assignment. Especially the wanting, which he compares to loving, Augustine sees as a possibility of creating an image of God, despite human limitations . . . Within the heart of De Trinitate, he states that one, who loves his neighbour, knows this love better than his neighbour. Every person is after all a mystery. Because, so he says, God is love, man can become aware of God if he contemplates the power within himself when he loves.29 God becomes

29 ‘Nemo dicat: “Non novi quod diligam”. Diligat fratrem, et diligat eamdem dilectionem. Magis enim novit dilectionem qua diligit, quam fratrem quem diligit. Ecce iam potest notiorem Deum habere quam fratrem; plane notiorem, quia praesentiorem;

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 195 most visible within a relationship, in the power with which one turns towards the other. Without image or without sound. God’s invisibility compared with love In his commentary on the rst epistle of St. John, written around 407, Augustine makes use of the light-metaphor to clarify this insight. Here, as in the Confessiones, he compares God to a light, purely immaterial and innitely beyond the light of sun or moon. Now, however, he associates light with man’s capacity to discern and to love. He, who is enlightened by this light, sees his own darkness; Augustine then proceeds to describe the hating of one’s neighbour as a sojourn in this darkness.30 The opposite of this hatred, love, is for him not only the power leading to the best insight into oneself or the world (cf. ‘res tantum cognoscitur, tantum amatur’!). It is the power by which, through which, in which one becomes aware of God. Elsewhere Augustine speaks of love as a gift of the Holy Spirit, or of love in the person of Jesus, who made of himself a gift for others and at the same time embodied the task for a person to become a gift for one’s neighbour (cf. sermo 53). In his commentary on John’s epistle he removes the division between love for the neighbour and the love for God.31 Loving man is equal to loving God. God is not only love, love is also God. For us it is relevant now to see

notiorem, quia interiorem; notiorem, quia certiorem. Amplectere dilectionem Deum et dilectione amplectere Deum’, De Trinitate 8.8.12. 30 ‘Aut quid est ipsa lux? aut quid sunt tenebrae? ne forte talia dicat ( Johannes, pvg), quae ad oculos istos nostros pertineant. Deus lux est: ait nescio quis: Et sol lux est, et luna lux est, et lucerna lux est. Aliquid debet esse longe his maius, longe praestantius, longeque supereminentius. Quantum Deus a creatura, quantum conditor a conditione, quantum sapientia ab eo quod factum est per sapientiam, longe ultra omnia debet esse lux ista. Et forte vicini ei erimus, si quae sit lux ista cognoverimus, et ad eam nos applicaverimus, ut ex ipsa illuminemur; quia in nobis tenebrae sumus, et ab illa illuminati possumus esse lux, et non confundi de illa, quia de nobis confundimur. Quis est qui de se confunditur? Qui se cognoscit peccatorem. Quis de illa non confunditur? Qui ab illa illuminatur. Quid est ab illa illuminari? Qui iam videt se peccatis tenebrari, et cupit ab illa illuminari, accedit ad illam: unde dicit Psalmus: Accedite ad eum, et illuminamini; et vultus vestri non erubescent’, In epistolam Iohannis ad Parthos 1.4; ‘Qui odit fratrem suum, in tenebris ambulat, et nescit quo eat; quoniam tenebrae excaecaverunt oculos eius (Eph. 4:2–3; In epistolam Iohannis ad Parthos 1.13). 31 Initially, Augustine saw love for ones neighbour as a step towards love for God. Cf. Agaësse, 1961, 47–53. Later he will dare to say that the presence of brotherly love removes all sin and that the absence of love encourages all other sins (sermo 5,3). He then also states that God is love and therefore love is God (sermo 7,6). Cf. Van Bavel, 1987).

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that Augustine uses John’s conception of love to make God conceivable in a very concrete manner, by describing the power of love not only as a gift of God, but as his very essence (being). Still, the essence of love remains a profound mystery. Hence, Augustine emphasizes (also in his commentary) that the eyes of the heart should not imagine God as something immeasurably great or, worse, as a grey old man. One must perceive God as love. No one, says Augustine, can say anything about love’s face, form or shape. And yet caritas has hands, for she reaches out for the poor; and ears, for she listens.32 In a word, Augustine’s advice is: ‘Abide in love, and love shall abide in you’. For Augustine, to conclude, God becomes most perceptible as the imperceptible One when the human being experiences the power of love or develops it. If he then reects upon this power, he ‘sees’ God. Conclusion The views of the Manichees, his reading of some works of Plotinus, and especially, the process of interiorizing the words of Scripture contributed to the fact that from 386 onwards Augustine’s way of speaking about God as an unknowable and ineffable mystery became a dominant theme in his work. During his whole lifetime as a priest and bishop he was anxious for conceptions of God that were qualied by tradition and cultural conditions. After his unexpected vocation to the priestly ofce at Hippo Regius in 390, his disputes with the Manichees increased extensively and intensively. In the works directed against them he rejected all conceptual and anthropomorphical ways of talking about God. In his rst commentary on Genesis he already had expressed his disgust of an image of God in which corporeal features

32 ‘Deum nemo vidit unquam: res est invisibilis; non oculo, sed corde quaerendus est. Sed quemadmodum si solem istum videre vellemus, oculum corporis purgaremus, unde videri lux potest; volentes videre Deum, oculum quo Deus videri potest, purgemus. Ubi est iste oculus? Audi Evangelium: Beati mundo corde, quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt. . . . Est quod cogites, si vis videre Deum: Deus Dilectio est. Qualem faciem habet dilectio? qualem formam habet? qualem staturam habet? quales pedes habet? quales manus habet? Nemo potest dicere. Habet tamen pedes; nam ipsi ducunt ad Ecclesiam: habet manus; nam ipsae pauperi porrigunt: habet oculos; nam inde intellegitur ille qui eget: Beatus, inquit, qui intellegit super egenum et pauperem. Habet aures, de quibus dicit Dominus: Qui habet aures audiendi, audiat. Non sunt membra distincta per locos, sed intellectu totum simul videt qui habet caritatem. Habita, et inhabitaberis; mane, et manebitur in te’, In epistolam Iohannis ad Parthos 7.10.

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 197 and human qualities are seen as references to God’s concrete being. Due to the hermeneutics he picked up in the Ambrose circle, he was able to interpret the biblical anthropomorphisms in a different way. During his time in Milan he began to comprehend them as imperfect though effective references to the spiritual powers and attributes of God. As he learned to observe the anthropomorphisms of writing thanks to the hermeneutics of Ambrose as references to God, he avoids the impasse into which several apologetics had become embroiled. Justin, Minucius Felix, and Tertullian reproached Greek philosophers that the pagan gods had many human qualities. Porphyry then reproached them that the Christians had adopted the Old Testament anthropomorphic representation of God. In this representation, God, after creation, is represented as a ‘tired worker’, or as one who uses his ngers to write of the tablets of law (Van der Leeuw, 1950, 449). In a certain way, the Neoplatonism of the Milan circle freed him from thinking that God was related, somehow or other, to the sensual perception of the material world. At the same time, he recognized that even a gurative reading of the divine attributes could not do full justice to God’s essence, for they implied temporal and spatial dimensions. Therefore, he thought these attributes, in their turn, had to be denied because they were, in his view, inappropriate to describe the essence of God. At the turn of the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius made the distinction between negative (apophatic) and positive (kataphatic) theology. The concrete manner in which Christians in his day spoke of God, in line with the canonical texts of the Old and the New Testament was characteristic of this positive theology. Dionysius considered such language as inaccurate, since God’s being and activity cannot be dened in terms that mirror or reect earthly conditions. He deemed it necessary to correct afrmations about God by negations. To some authors (Armstrong, 1975, 77–89) it seems regrettable that Augustine did not fully appreciate Plotinus’ apophatic theology. Our conclusion that Augustine—without a doubt judging from a keynote in his writings—may be seen as one of the recursors of this apophatic theology is justied. Moreover, it cannot be denied that Augustine was well versed in Plotinus’ (and Plato’s) fundamental views. But, to paraphrase Derrida, Augustin also negates the negation (dénegation). In this way he ‘betrays’ the mystery of God by describing its essence in positive terms and by looking for names with which to name God. Compared with his precursors and contemporaries, however, his uniqueness shows itself in his search for human experiences with

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which to make God perceptible in his imperceptibility. In the Confessiones he does not hesitate to evoke an awareness, an experience of God by appealing to man’s sensory faculties. He draws near to the innite God not only with the help of abstract terms such as ‘being’, ‘substance’, ‘the Absolute’, or ‘Truth’; for this purpose he also uses much more tangible metaphors and anthropomorphisms. Then Augustine immediately proceeds with opposing to the same metaphors and anthropomorphism he is using. In a similar way he presents the memory of sensory and affective experiences as being a parallel to the experience of God; yet, at the same time, he is opposed to it. Moreover, he does not delimit speaking in images, or the recollection of experiences, or equating love with God, being fully aware that this would implicate him in a dualism between God and world, the nite and the innite. Thus, Augustine gave preference to Light and Love as images referring to God and considered them to be the most appropriate representations of God because they are the most felicitous expression of God’s not being bound by time and space. Consequently, Augustine, as a young priest and as an old bishop, kept on repeating his advice that man in his way of life should avoid being drawn towards the material, and that he should not adopt an image of God determined by earthly representations. Above all, he preferred to speak of God as an ineffable mystery, who nonetheless may be addressed as a person. This emphasis is a keynote of his work. His rst commentary on Genesis and his sermons both reveal that for some decades he feared that the parvuli would perceive God as corporeal being, as an old man with a beard. In De Trinitate, it appears that everyone has to be considered a parvulus: nobody is able to understand the mystery of God. God’s being and action cannot be dened in terms or images that mirror earthly conditions. Even the images of Light and Love do not fully dene God’s being and his action in the world. LITERATURE Primary literature Confessionum libri XIII (CCSL 27, 1–273). De ciuitate Dei (CCSL 47, 1–314; 48, 321–866). De doctrina christiana libri quattor (CSEL 80, 3–169). De ordine libri duo (CCSL 29, 87–137). De de et symbolo (CSEL 1–32). De de rerum invisibilium (CCSL 46, 1–19).

9. augustine’s thoughts on how god may be represented 199 De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (CSEL 28, 1, 3–435). De Genesi aduersus Manicheos libri duo (CSEL 91, 67–172). De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus Manicheorum libri duo (CSEL 90, 3–156). De Trinitate libri quindecim (CCSL 50, 25–380; 50A, 381–535). Epistulae (CSEL, 43, 44, 57). In epistolam Iohannis ad Parthos, Tractatus VII, 5–7, in: P. Agaësse (intr., ed., trans.), Commentaire de la première épître de S. Jean. Paris, 1961. In Iohannis euangelium tractatus CXXIV (CCL 36, 1–688). Retractationum libri II. (CCSL 57, 5–143). Sermones, in: PL 36 (Sancti Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi Opera Omnia, dl.5); cf. AL, dl. 2 XVIXXIV. Sermo 23 (PL 38, 155–162). Sermo 53 in: Révue Bénédictine 104 (1994), 21–33. Sermo 277 (PL 38, 1257–1268). On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees. Unnished Literal Commentary on Genesis. De Genesi ad Litteram. Trans. E. Hill, M. O’Connel; intr. M. Fiedrowicz; ed. J. Rotelle, New York, 2002 (The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century. Pt. I: Books, vol. 13: On Genesis). Sermons II. On the Old Testament. Trans. E. Hill; ed. J. Rotelle, New York, 1991 (The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century. Pt. III: Sermons, vol. 2: Sermons 20–50). Sermons III. On the Saints. Trans. E. Hill; ed. J. Rotelle, New York, 1991 (The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century. Pt III. Sermons, vol. 3: sermons 273–305a). Secondary literature Armstrong, A.H., The Escape of the One: An Investigation of some Possibilities of Apophatic Theology Imperfectly Realised in the West, Berlin, 1975, 77–89 (Studia Patristica 13). Bavel, T.J. van, ‘Spreken of zwijgen over God bij Augustinus’, in Tijdschrift voor Theologie 37(1997), 132–147. ———, ‘The double Face of Love in St. Augustine. The Daring Inversion: Love is God’, in Congresso Internazionale su S. Agostino nel XVI centenario della conversione, Roma, 15–20 settembre 1986, Roma, 1987, vol. 3, 69–80. ———, ‘Wij moeten leren het onuitspreekbare op onuitsprekelijke wijze te zien’. Theologie en spiritualiteit in Augustinus’ De Trinitate’, in P. van Geest, H. van Oort (ed.), Augustiniana Neerlandica. Aspecten van de spiritualiteit van Augustinus, LeuvenDudley, 2005, 165–185. Carabine, D., ‘Negative Theology in the Thought of Saint Augustine’, in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 59 (1992), 5–22. Geest, P. van, Stellig maar onzeker. Augustinus benadering van God, Budel, 2007. ———, Stellig maar onzeker. Augustinus over de wereld en God, Amsterdam, 2006 [inaugural lecture Free University Amsterdam]. Gilson, E., La Philosophie au Moyen Âge, Paris, 1980 (repr.). Grifn, C., Paulsen, D., ‘Augustine and the Corporeality of God’, in Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002), 97–118. Hombert, P.-M., Nouvelles recherches de chronologie augustinienne, Paris, 2000. Latour, B., ‘What is Iconoclash? Or is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?’, in Latour, B., Weibel, P., (eds.), Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Karlsruhe, 2002, 14–37 (Veröffentlichtingen Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie). Leeuw, G. van der, ‘Anthropomorphismus’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 1 (1950), 446–450.

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Madec, G., ‘Deus’, in: A. Mayer (ed.), K.-H. Chelius, A. Grote (red.), Augustinus-Lexikon, Basel, 1986–. . . Dl. 2, fasc. 1/2 (Basel 1996), kol. 314–322, fasc. 3/4 (Basel 1999), 322–366. Miles, M., ‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in St. Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions’, in: The Journal of Religion 63 (1983), 125–142. Paffenroth, K., ‘Paulsen on Augustine: An Incorporeal or Nonanthropomorphic God?’, in Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993), 233–235. Paulsen, D., ‘Early Christian Belief in a Corporal Deity. Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses’, in Harvard Theological Review 83 (1990), 105–116. ———, ‘Reply to Kim Paffenroth’s Comment’, in Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993), 235–239. ———, ‘Augustin rencontre le livre de la Genèse’, in: De Genesi contra Manicheos’, ‘De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus’ di Agostino d’Ippona. Commento di G. Pelland, e.a., Palermo, 1992, 15–53 (Settimana Agostiniana Pavese 8). ———, Cinq études d’Augustin sur le début de la Génèse, Tournai-Montréal, 1972, 17–22. Pollmann, K., Doctrina christiana. Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina Christiana, Fribourg 1996, 11–21 (Paradosis 41). Rijk, L.M. de, De rol van de taal bij het empirisme bij Aristoteles (384–322 v. Chr.) Amsterdam, 2004 (KNAW, Mededelingen van de Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, dl. 67, nr. 1); Teske, R., ‘The Aim of Augustine’s Proof that God Really Is’, in International Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1986), 253–268.

10. THE SAINT AS ICON: TRANSFORMATION OF BIBLICAL IMAGERY IN EARLY MEDIEVAL HAGIOGRAPHY Nienke Vos (Free University of Amsterdam) Introduction In the history of Christian art, altar pieces are of high renown, such as the Isenheim altar piece at Colmar, painted by Matthias Grünewald (circa 1514). At the centre we observe the suffering Christ, covered in sores. On either side, saints are pictured on the side panels: saint Sebastian and Antony the Abt. When the central piece representing Christ’s suffering is opened, the scenes of the annunciation, the birth of Christ and the resurrection appear in radiant colours. On feast days, the inner shrine was opened to reveal yet another collection of gures: saint Antony, saint Jerome and saint Augustine. Although my contribution lacks the complexity of this altar piece and possibly the notion of one dominant scene, I do aim to portray three saintly gures, which are interrelated. Thus, my story may be compared to a triptych, displaying three images of three saints, painted not in glorious colours, but in evocative words. The three saints have been selected on the basis of my interest in the development of early medieval hagiography. I have opted for three highlights of hagiographical literature, from the late ancient to the early medieval period, in order to trace a line of development across several centuries. Attention is focused on the famous Saint Martin, Saint Benedict and Saint Willibrord. Their Lives were put down in writing by three eminent authors: Sulpicius Severus, Gregory the Great and Alcuin of York. Their hagiographical activity appears with intervals of, roughly, two hundred years. The Life of Martin was probably put into circulation in 397, the Life of Benedict was written around 594 and the Life of Willibrord between 785 and 797 (De Vogüé 1978, 25–27; Fontaine 1967, 17; Reischmann, 1989, 14). These works of literature, which are specimens of the early Christian and hagiographical genre of the vita, possess an especially imaginative

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quality. As they narrate the lives of individual saints, strong impressions are made on the reader. As the story unfolds, the reader will encounter the saint in different shapes and forms. However, in the end it is the goal of the writer to project an image of the saint which is well-rounded, powerful and complete. Various aspects are fused in order to create a picture of holiness, which can appeal to the reader and even elicit a moral response, hopefully an experience of conversion. In this article, I will analyse this activity of image building from a number of angles and I will focus primarily on the themes of iconoclasm and iconoclash. In the case of each saint and its accompanying author I will ask in which way iconoclasm is represented in a fairly literal sense. This means that I will discuss passages about the concrete missionary activities of the saints, as described in the vitae. Literal iconoclasm generally involves the destruction of pagan symbols, such as images, altars and trees. In a metaphorical sense, I will consider the theme of conict, or clash, in these texts. For these works are all witnesses to a certain type of conict inherent in their respective contexts. I will show how the saint becomes in a sense the icon of this conict. Thus, the saint embodies the tensions of his particular social setting. In addition, I will incorporate observations about the usage of scriptural material in the vitae. This usage often relates to the aforementioned literal and gural meanings of iconoclash. It will become apparent how biblical models are shared in the telling of the story, but also how they are transformed. As times change, preferences for certain biblical gures shift and the connections between the saints and their biblical precursors are constantly redened. Saint Martin Literal iconoclasm Saint Martin is the rst character we encounter. His Life was composed by Sulpicius Severus, around 396, in all likelihood before the saint died, which explains why a deathbed scene is not incorporated. After Martin’s death, the vita gained instant popularity and was, according to the author himself, copied widely and sold even in Rome (Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi I, 23). Sulpicius was a Roman citizen who probably received a good rhetorical education at Bordeaux. He owned a large estate in Gaul and had a promising career. Like his contemporary,

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Paulinus of Nola, his life changed when he came into contact with the holy man of Tours, bishop Martin. Inspired by his humble and ascetic existence, he left his life of worldly ambitions and opted for a life of solitude (Mönnich 1962, 7–8; Stancliffe 1983, 15–54). It seems, however, that Sulpicius’ life of renunciation was less harsh than that of his master Martin (Van Dam 1985, 134–136). The picture which is conjured up in Sulpicius’ Dialogues suggests an amicable retreat, secluded. It includes the pleasures of dinners and entertaining companionship. Sulpicius’ Roman villa annex monastery resonated with the ideals of the Roman otium. However, despite his own soft spot for a little luxury, Sulpicius narrated the life of Martin, his icon of goodness, with great fervour. From the outset, it becomes apparent that Martin’s life has iconic quality. I will address the famous scene at the gate of Amiens in a moment (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 3), but rst I want to mention the depiction of Martin’s rst miracle. This happens to be a rather dramatic and momentous event, as it concerns a resuscitation (VM 7). The story goes that Martin was away on business for a few days when a young catechumen, who had recently joined him to become acquainted with the ascetic life, falls ill and dies. Upon his return, Martin nds the brothers of his monastic community in tears and orders them to leave the cell of their brother.1 Like the biblical prophet Elijah,2 he positions himself on top of the dead body and begins to pray. After two hours, the eyelids of the young man begin to move and he regains consciousness. He is raised to life, like the son of the widow of Sarephat.3 The resuscitated man is baptised immediately and thus ofcially incorporated into the community of believers, embodied in the church. This tale afrms the power of the saint, who is styled after one of great prophets of the Old Testament, Elijah. The similarity between Elijah and Martin is powerful, especially since iconoclasm plays an important role in both their careers. After the narration of the rst miracles, both resuscitations, Martin’s election 1 The organisation seems to have been exible. Martin founded a monastic settlement on the property of Hilary, bishop of Poitiers. It was called Locociacum (later Ligugé). Around the cell of Martin a community developed. It seems that catechumens could join the saint in his ascetic way of life. See also Nissen/Rose 1997, 35. 2 Cf. 1 Kgs 17:21. 3 Cf. the story about the son of the Shunnamite woman in the narrative cycle about Elisha (2 Kgs 4:34–35).

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to the bishopric of Tours, to which I will return later, and the description of his monastic lifestyle (VM 7–10), Sulpicius launches into stories concerned with the christianisation of the land. At this point, some striking examples of iconoclasm are included. Interestingly, the rst instance is not concerned with pagans, but with Christians. It relates the way in which Martin puts an end to the unwarranted worship of an inauthentic martyr. It turns out that the local inhabitants do not revere a martyr, but a bad robber, who was beaten to death because of his crimes. With good reason, Martin orders the altar, which was the focus of devotion to be removed (VM 11). The second story is about a ritual which involves the body of a dead pagan, covered with white sheets. At rst, Martin believes he is witnessing a procession of an idol and thus a pagan ritual of sacrice. Therefore, he forces the group to stop. Subsequently, however, he discovers that it concerns a ritual of burial. And although he is obviously not a supporter of pagan religion, he does allow the ritual to proceed, because he realises that it neither involves an idolatrous image, nor a rite of sacrice (VM 12). In this case, iconoclasm is suggested, but not brought about. Chapter 13 narrates a tale of a holy pine tree. After Martin has demolished an old temple, he starts to cut down a holy pine. The priest and the ‘rest of the pagans’ voice a protest and will not allow the tree to be cut. Martin argues that he is bound to take down the tree since it is devoted to a demon. Subsequently, the parties strike a deal: the pagans promise to cut down the tree on the condition that they may place Martin under it. Martin, in a position resembling that of the suffering Christ, is tied to the tree and is almost crushed as the pagans start to wield their axes. However, at the last moment, when the tree falls down, a mighty wind (turbo) reverses the direction in which the tree is falling, almost crushing the pagan farmers. The result of this mighty and divine intervention consists in the conversion of the pagans. Salvation has come to the area and churches and monasteries are omnipresent. The author explains, which relates to our theme, that ‘wherever Martin tore down places of pagan worship, he built churches and monasteries.’ (VM 13) It is obvious that Martin is a saint who is ‘on the move’ (Van Dam 1985, 132); he rushes around his bishopric and cleanses the region of pagan worship. Chapters 14–15 include more passages which relate the demolition of shrines. Fires are lit and temples are destroyed; prayers are answered when Martin as a soldier of Christ is supported

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by angelic armies (VM 2).4 He smashes the idols. The author also tells us that when the pagans were resistant, the preaching of Martin often softened their hearts in such a way that they themselves, on their own account, tore down their temples, when he had shown them the light of truth (VM 15). In short, the pagan symbols of altar, shrine, temple, tree and idol are replaced by churches and monasteries. Closely related to the organisation of the church is the symbol of baptism, which receives special attention in the vita. Other symbols of holy presence, apart from the saint himself, are also mentioned when ‘relic-like’ objects, connected to the saint, are described. These occur in passages which narrate healings. In these instances threads of Martin’s clothing and a letter written by him convey miraculous power of healing (VM 18–19). In this way, the ministries of Jesus and the apostle Paul are recalled.5 Metaphorical iconoclash So far, I have worked with a more of less literal interpretation of iconoclasm and iconoclash. Another more gural mode of interpretation concerns a conict within the connes of Christianity itself. Therefore we turn to the famous scene of Martin’s act of charity at the gate of Amiens (VM 3). In this story, he is moved by a poor beggar and decides to cut his mantle in half and give half of it to the beggar. At this point, the bystanders react: they mock Martin’s pitiful appearance. His deformed looks may remind the reader of Jesus in his suffering. When Martin falls asleep, he receives a vision in which Jesus appears to him, clothed in half a mantle. He informs the angels who are standing by: ‘Martin, who is only a catechumen, has clothed me with this garment.’ He afrms the fact that Martin has done good, recalling words from the gospel: ‘What you have done to these little ones of mine, you have done for me’ (Matt 25:40). Subsequently, Martin receives the sacrament of baptism. The motif of poverty and humility is repeated in the story of Martin’s election to the episcopal see of Tours (VM 9). In this case, the people want him to be their bishop, but the bishops are not at all pleased. They disapprove of his lthy clothes and his unkempt hair.

4 This image transforms Martin’s earlier career as a literal soldier in the army of the emperor. 5 Cf. e.g. Luke 8:43–48; Matt 14:36; Acts 19:11–12.

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Tension between the episcopal hierarchy and Martin reappears in chapter 20, when Sulpicius tells about a visit to the emperor Maximus at Trier. At rst, Martin refuses to come, because this emperor has killed the other emperor. Maximus, however, argues that he was obliged to do so, on account of both his soldiers and God. Martin concedes and joins the emperor for dinner. He sits on a low stool, however, and when he has been offered a drink, he passes the cup to a priest, ordained to holy ofce, not to the king, a layman. In doing so, he dees the king. Sulpicius comments that such action was unheard of. No bishop had ever done such a thing. This remark afrms what the author claimed at the beginning of the chapter, namely, that all the bishops were subservient to the king. In these passages, the clash which is portrayed involves two opposing views of Christianity: one which colludes with the ways of the world, admiring clean clothes and the riches of empire, and another which subverts those time-honoured values and expresses itself in poverty and humility. Precisely this clash is represented by another vision Martin receives. This time, however, it involves the devil. This enemy of the divine, who often appears under the guise of the pagan, Roman gods (VM 22), at one point claims to be Christ himself. Clothed in royal robes, wearing a headband of gold and gemstones and shoes covered with gold, the devil appears to Martin with a calm and bright face, surrounded by light. Still, the holy Spirit enlightens Martin’s mind and he is able to see through the trickery. He responds that the Lord Jesus has not announced that he will return clothed in purple and gold. Martin will not believe that Christ has come, unless it is in the appearance of his suffering, with the signs of the cross (VM 24). Finally, emphasis is placed on the motif of humility in the following chapter, when Sulpicius narrates that when he himself met Martin, the holy man washed his feet, in imitation of Christ (VM 25).6 By linking the contrast between riches and humility, to that between both the devil and Christ and the bishops and Martin, the bishops appear in an especially unfavourable light. Thus, it comes as no surprise that in the nal chapter they are cast in the role of Martin’s persecutors (VM 27). In the mind of the author, they are no better than the pagan

6

Cf. John 13.

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farmers who still worship idols in the elds of Gaul, or worse, than the devil himself. Saint Martin as icon: biblical gures To conclude this section, I wind up the rst panel of the triptych by reiterating that various biblical images apply to Martin. In an Old Testament sense, he resembles the prophet Elijah, whose battle was the eradication of polytheism and the foundation of monotheism in ancient Israel. Pictures taken from the New Testament also appear, for instance, the Pauline metaphor of the ‘soldier of Christ’, which resonates with Martin’s former career as a soldier in the Roman army (VM 2). But perhaps the strongest image is that of the suffering Christ, half naked, half dressed, in the piece of the mantle which Martin donated to the beggar. In this way, Christ becomes the recipient of Martin’s good works, but also his gure of identication, for Martin’s life itself is dened by poverty. Thus, the actions and visions which portray the humility of Christ and his follower, build up an icon of what Christianity implies. This icon triggered animosity. Saint Benedict Literal iconoclasm Benedict’s vita, although under debate (Clark 2003), was probably composed by Gregory the Great around 600. We move from Gaul to Italy and from the rather individual aspirations of Sulpicius to the pontical concerns of Gregory. In an attempt to assure his fellow countrymen that, although Rome had fallen and the world was falling apart, Italy was not devoid of holy men, he wrote no less than four books of Dialogues which narrate the Lives of saints. The stories he relates, are interspersed with dialogical passages in which Peter, a friend of Gregory’s, asks questions, often of an exegetical nature, and Gregory answers in teacher mode. Book II of the Dialogues recounts the Life of Benedict. Like the Life of Martin, it also includes instances of classic iconoclasm, but less so. The most signicant passage involves the move to Monte Cassino. On this mountain, to which Benedict relocates, a fort and a temple dedicated to Apollo have been built. This is the rst explicit reference in the vita to pagan religion. The temple is surrounded by holy bushes which are dedicated to demons. Benedict takes on the traits of

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an Old Testament prophet as he smashes the idol, tears down the altar and cuts down the bushes. Subsequently, he builds an oratory for saint Martin and a chapel dedicated to saint John (Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi II, 8). Chapter 10 also mentions an idol, as a small bronze artefact is thrown away in the kitchen, which immediately starts to burn. Benedict puts out the re and is thus triumphant over evil. The hagiographer refers to the demolition of the altar of Apollo again when he explains that both Benedict and his sister Scholastica are buried in the chapel of saint John. One could argue that, in a sense, the image of Apollo is replaced by the image of saint. The body of the saint is able to evolve into a new locus of devotion. Metaphorical iconoclash While iconoclasm on a literal level does not receive much attention, the notion of ‘clash’ is omnipresent. The rst real clash occurs in chapter 3, when Benedict, after a period of ascetic isolation, is asked by a community of brothers to become their leader. He is reticent, because he feels his leadership will be too strict for them. However, they are adamant and Benedict gives in. Over time, it turns out that his rule of life is, indeed, too strict and the monks begin to hate him. They even forge a plot to get him out of the way: they add poison to the wine in the eucharistic cup. One of the most evocative scenes in the vita follows, as Benedict lifts the cup of thanksgiving. When he makes the sign of the cross, the cup explodes into a thousand smithereens and danger is averted. Benedict, however, realises that this was an attempt on his life and even though the principle of death was unable to conquer the principle of life, he does draw his conclusions and leaves the monastery. This scene of conict is especially harsh and expresses confrontation in the sharpest manner. Still, the issue of authority and obedience is central to the Life and appears again and again. Numerous passages depicting disobedient men and women are recounted. I cite a few. Chapter 23 tells the story of two noble women who have chosen the ascetic life but who cannot stop talking. They tittle-tattle and make the life of their priest unbearable. In despair the priest turns to Benedict who warns the women that they must learn to hold their tongue. If not, he will have to ban them from the church. Soon, the women die and whenever communion is celebrated at the altar, the woman who has nursed the deceased sees their souls eeing the church, as soon as

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the host is raised. When Benedict hears of this, he sends a consecrated host and orders it to be placed on the bodies of the deceased. After that, their souls are able to rest in peace. The second instance concerning obedience and the sad demise of a lost soul is narrated in chapter 24. In this case, a young man disobeys the rule of stabilitas loci and leaves the monastery without a blessing to visit his parents. Inadvertently, he dies and the grave spits him out each time they put him in it. Again, a host is sent by Benedict to grant the dead monk some peace. It is placed on his body and the grave at last accepts the deceased. Apart from providing a link to the theme of obedience, these two vignettes also witness to the importance of the host in the vita. The eucharistic bread has a relic-like function and is able to convey the power of the saint. Other stories of disobedience involve monks who commit a sin related to food: they try to hide the fact that they have eaten and consequently have deed the Rule (Dialogi II, 12–13). It is signicant, by the way, that these instances of disobedience often resonate with the Rule of Benedict concerning, for example, the themes of speech, stability of place and food.7 Saint Benedict as icon: biblical gures The fact that these monks are unable to hide their sins from Benedict, who is able to see through them, may remind the reader of the biblical story of the prophet Elisha and his helper Gehazi. Gehazi also thought he could cover up his disobedience, but Elisha saw through him and punished him (2 Kgs 5:19–27). Another story in the Life of Benedict which is related to both the issue of obedience and the biblical gure of Elisha, occurs in chapter 28. During a famine, a man comes to the door of the monastery and asks for oil. Since there is hardly any left, the cellarer consults Benedict as to what he should do and the saint orders him to give the oil to the man at the door. The cellarer, however, is concerned that there will not be any left and refuses to give the oil away. When Benedict questions him about what he has done, he admits he has disobeyed the order of the abbot, who in turn becomes very angry and orders the ask of oil to be thrown out of a window onto the rocks outside. Miraculously, the glass

7

For a story about stabilitas loci, see Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi II, 25.

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container does not break. Once Benedict has criticised the disobedient monk, he kneels down to pray in the presence of the other brothers. As soon as the prayer begins, oil starts to ow within the earthenware jugs that are at hand. After a while, they overow with oil. The tale is reminiscent of a similar miracle performed by Elisha (2 Kgs 4:1–7). Another miracle which resembles one performed by this prophet, involves an axe. Gregory tells it in chapter 6. A simple-minded Goth wants to cut down some bushes in order to plant a garden. In the process, the blade of his axe comes loose and sinks to the bottom of the lake. Benedict is called and he places the handle in the water. Immediately, the iron rises up from the deep and reconnects to the wooden handle (2 Kgs 6:1–7). By considering these stories, I have highlighted some important emphases of the author. The underlying conict he suggests, time and again, is predominantly related to the context of the monastery and its main issue is obedience. It is telling that the focus on objects is more marked, compared to the Life of Martin. A biblical gure which occurs repeatedly throughout the vita is Elisha from the Old Testament. This character underscores both the theme of disobedience and the prominence of objects. While Elisha is dominant as a gure of identication, other scriptural examples also appear, such as Peter, Moses and David (Dialogi II, 8). In the mind of Gregory, however, they all stand in the shadows of that one luminous person from the Bible, Christ himself. In a far-reaching statement on exemplarity, the author comments that ‘the man of God’, Benedict, possessed the spirit of only one, namely of Him who by the grace of salvation fulls the hearts of all the chosen and of whom John says: “He was the true light which illuminates everyone who is coming into the world” but of whom it is also written in Scripture: “From his fullness, we—not all—have received.” (Dialogi II, 8)8 The difference between the saints of the Old and the New Testament is that the latter are able to pass on the power of God in Christ (Dialogi II, 8). Therefore, Gregory is able to attribute such great power to Benedict and even to identify the Son of God and the holy man.

8

Quotations from John 1:16,19.

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Saint Willibrord Literal iconoclasm Our third and last vita, then, is the Life of Willibrord. It was written by Alcuin, a Northumbrian, who was related to Willibrord and shared his background. He received his schooling in York and after travels on the continent he became part of the royal entourage surrounding Charlemagne in 781. For quite a number of years he was stationed at the abbey of saint Martin at Tours. He was supportive of the king’s attempts to restructure education in the kingdom and actively participated in many theological debates. He also became the biographer of a man who played an important role in the christianisation of the Frankish lands and the regions beyond the borders. Therefore, the vita denitely possesses a dynastic colouring (Reischmann 1989, 17–23). This dynastic avour relates to the Carolingian dynasty, but also to the family of Willibrord himself. While the Lives of Martin and Benedict devote little space to the subject of parental inuence, Willibrord is depicted as someone born into a family of deep Christian sentiment. His father Wilgis almost qualies as a monk, were it not for the fact that he fathered a son (Alcuinus, Vita Willibrordi 1). Willibrord is educated in the monastery of Ripon to which he is dedicated as a child (VW 3). At the age of 20 he crosses the sea to Ireland in order to become more intimately acquainted with the ways of Irish spirituality. He learns about the ideal of peregrinatio: wandering for the sake of the gospel, letting the boat sail and preaching the gospel wherever the wind takes him. It is a far cry from the stabilitas loci of the Benedictine Rule (VW 4). In the vita of Willibrord, the age of 33 is a turning point (VW 5). This is not surprising, as it is the age of Jesus when he died and rose from the dead. The age of ‘circa 33’ often signals a dramatic turn of events in hagiographical literature.9 So it is here. Like a group of apostles, Willibrord and eleven companions sail the seas and land in the Low Countries. Utrecht, an old Roman settlement, conveniently positioned at a crossing of the Rhine, is still in the hands of the barbaric Frisians and their king Radbod. A reference to Willibrord’s visit to Utrecht must be explained as a statement styled in retrospect.

9

Cf. e.g. Athanasius Alexandrinus, Vita Antonii 10. Antony’s age is 35.

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Subsequently, Francia is visited and acquaintance is made with king Pippin. It is important to note that in the vita, Willibrord closely links his missionary fate to the imperial power of the Carolingian king, Alcuinian style. While the Life of Martin and the Life of Benedict contain biting scenes of conict between king and saint, we nd no such tension in the Life of Willibrord. The Carolingian project of domination and the Willibrordian project of mission go hand in hand. Apart from a blessing by the king, Willibrord needs a blessing from Rome. We write the year 690 when Willibrord is ordained by pope Sergius to be a bishop, an apostle to the Frisians (VW 7). He returns home, loaded with relics. This is signicant, since the foundation of new churches depended on the presence of relics (Honée 1995, 36). Well prepared, backed by both royal and pontical consent, and carrying relics, the saint is ready to preach the gospel to the heathen (VW 6). From the outset, Alcuin sketches Willibrord’s missionary intentions with prophetic and apostolic overtones. The imagery of harvest and food is found in chapter 8 when the author writes that the ‘man of God’ (vir dei) was sowing the seeds of life, especially in areas where hunger from a lack of knowledge needed to be stilled (VW 8). Apparently, the saint longs to provide the people with fruit, assisted by the grace of God. Churches and communities of the faithful are signs that the new cult of the one true God is established. The term vir dei is reminiscent of both the prophet Elisha and saint Benedict.10 Like Elijah and Elisha, Willibrord crosses boundaries into unknown territory in order to bring his Christian message to the pagans. Chapter 9 narrates his encounter with non-Christian leaders, Radbod and Ongendus. Again an image from the context of harvesting is introduced: ‘the waters of heavenly teaching’. The Frisian king welcomes Willibrord with honour, but does not allow his heart of stone to be softened by the words of life. No fruit is to be expected from this soil and Willibrord moves on to the king of the Danes. Ongendus, ‘wilder than any animal and harder than any stone’ (VW 9), also treats the saint with respect, but hardens his heart and remains loyal to the worship of idols. Little success to speak of, it seems, and little iconoclasm to speak of, so far.

10 Saint Benedict is called vir dei in the Dialogi and Elisha is designated as such, for instance in 2 Kgs 2:6.

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However, in the following chapter, Willibrord reaches the island of Fosites (Helgoland), where idols are dedicated to their god ‘Fosite’. The places of worship are treated with respect and animals which are grazing there, are left untouched. The water which springs up from the well may only be drawn in silence. When the saint reaches this spot, however, he wants to rid it of pagan practice and he baptizes three people with water from the well, not in silence, but calling upon the holy trinity. He also orders some animals to be slaughtered for food. The pagans expect the missionaries to either drop dead or become insane, but no such thing occurs. The news travels to Radbod fast. The king of the Frisians explodes upon hearing of such sacrilege (VW 11). He orders Willibrord to account for his actions. At this point, the hagiographer includes a segment of direct speech, representing a sermon from the missionary. He argues that Radbod does not worship a god, but the devil. Therefore, his soul will burn in eternal re. Only one God truly exists and He has created heaven and earth. Willibrord asks Radbod to be baptised with the water of life and cleansed from all his sins. As a born-again Christian he will lead a life of sobriety, justice and holiness. If he does not repent, however, he will burn in hell forever. Radbod concludes that Willibrord does not hesitate to use threatening language. However, he remains unconverted. Chapter 12, then, summarizes the saint’s activities: cutting out the roots of pagan idolatry, founding churches, preaching, baptising and instructing young Christians about their lifestyle. Subsequently, Pippin’s son Charles, conquers Radbod and thus opens up new possibilities for mission (VW 13). One more example of iconoclastic activity is included and it is situated on the island of Walcheren (VW 14). An idol of the ‘ancient error’ is served and Willibrord smashes it to pieces. The local priest is furious and tries to kill the saint. God protects his apostle, but his companions threaten to murder the pagan priest in return. Willibrord prevents this. Three days later, however, the man dies. This event is underscored by the biblical quotation: ‘Mine is the vengeance and I will accomplish it, says the Lord.’ Little compassion oozes from these pages and we are back in the ancient world of Elijah and Elisha where resistance to the prophets is easily punished by death. It is striking how often punishment occurs in this vita (VW 15; 20; 30). One wonders whether this is related to the more prominent role of earthly power and authority in the work. It seems that the notion of religious control is enhanced by the increase of political control.

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I round off this section by drawing attention to one last aspect. Earlier in this article, I considered the sacrament, in connection to churches, as an element which replaces the pagan cult. Relics function in a similar way and we have seen how, in Willibrord’s time, the founding of churches was closely related to the presence of relics. In a manner comparable to the vita about Benedict, the Life of Willibrord also affords an important place to the body and grave of the saint. In comparison to the story of Benedict, more posthumous miracles are recounted. Thus, the worship of temple and idol, of holy tree and holy well, is replaced by a focus on church and sacrament, on relic and burial site. Metaphorical iconoclash Once more, I turn to the metaphorical meaning of iconoclash. Which conict is inherent in the Life of Willibrord? Which web of tensions is lurking behind the scenes? In the section on iconoclasm we have mainly encountered rather standard confrontations of pagans versus Christians or, more specically, of Radbod versus Willibrord. Indeed, Pippin and Charles, the Carolingian kings and forebears of Alcuin’s patron Charlemagne were in fact the powerful opponents of the Frisian kingdom. Thus, in a sense two contexts of confrontation are fused: the ght between Carolingians and Frisians is identied with the battle between Christians and pagans. Apart from that, no resistance to speak of seems to lurk beneath the surface. Rather, the harmonious relationship between Willibrord and the Frankish king is suspiciously straightforward. It also results in a somewhat bland description of Willibrord’s activities. He seems to have been safely sanitized and encased in the world of Frankish propaganda. Saint Willibrord as icon: a biblical gure In connection to the statement made above, I want to present one last specimen of biblical exemplarity. This means we have to return to the early stages of the vita when Willibrord’s youthful dedication to the monastery is related (VW 3). In this segment, he is portrayed as the young Samuel, who was dedicated to the temple of Shilo when he was still a boy. It is well known that Samuel came to play an important role in the later history of ancient Israel. For he was the chosen one to anoint the rst king of Israel, Saul, when the people had asked God

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to provide them with a king (1 Sam 1; 8–10). Subsequently, when the reign of Saul became problematic, a new king was elected, David, and Samuel was the prophet who anointed him. Nowhere in the Life of Willibrord the connection between ‘Samuel’ and ‘David’ is made explicit, but it is well known that Alcuin used the name ‘David’ to refer to Charlemagne, for instance in his letters (e.g. Alcuinus, Epistulae 25; 41; 126). By suggesting that Willibrord was in a sense a Samuel incarnate, Alcuin in fact claimed that the dynasty of the new David of Frankish origin was authorized by the ointment of divine consent. Conclusion In early Christian and early medieval hagiography, the saint appears as a character who cleanses his pagan environment with the passion of Old Testament prophets and who replaces the cultic objects with the Christian symbols of churches, chapels, sacraments and relics. In the nal analysis, it is the body of the deceased saint which provides a new focus of religious attention. Apart from this rather straightforward form of iconoclasm, the vitae also testify to deeper clashes beneath the surface, signalling the fact that the saint is not only the centre of attention, but also the centre of tension. In the Life of Martin, conicts occurs within the episcopal hierarchy, based on the saint’s extreme ideal of poverty as exemplied by the vision of Christ, clothed in half a mantle. The clashes in the Life of Benedict are not situated within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but within the connes of the monastery. In this case, the punishment of Elisha’s servant Gehazi is iconic of the situation. The vita of Willibrord resonates strongly with the missionary activity of a saint like Martin. The setting, however, is markedly different, for the battle against paganism has become embedded within the larger project of the Frankish aspirations to conquer the surrounding lands. In short, the saints, modelled by their hagiographers, become icons of specic situations. Biblical imagery, associated with them, is effortlessly adapted to the demands of the times. Where the Old Testament is concerned, the Elijah-like quality of Martin underscores both his healing and his iconoclastic activities. The Elisha-like styling of Benedict matches the dominant theme of obedience and an increased interest

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in the miraculous potential of concrete objects. And nally, the subtle reference to Samuel in the Life of Willibrord conjures up the origins of divine kingship. In terms of the New Testament, the vitae share an interest in both Jesus Christ and his famous apostles like Peter and Paul. The Saviour himself, however, remains the main gure of identication. In that sense, this contribution does seem to have gained a central focus, like the central panel of the Isenheim altar piece. For behind each and every saint, the colours of the passion and resurrection of Christ light up. Thus, it is not surprising that within the inner shrine at Colmar, one nds oneself in the sacred company of three saints. LITERATURE Alcuinus Turonensis, Epistulae, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolarum Tom. 4, Karolini aevi 2, E. Dümmler (ed.), Berlijn 1895. ———, Vita Willibrordi archiepiscopi Traiectensis, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 7, W. Levison (ed.), Hannover 1919, 113–141. Athanase d’Alexandrie (Athanasius Alexandrinus), Vie d’Antoine (Vita Antonii ), Sources Chrétiennes 400, Bartelink, G.J.M. (ed.), Paris 1994. Clark, F., The ‘Gregorian’ Dialogues and the origins of Benedictine monasticism, Leiden 2003. Grégoire le Grand (Gregorius Magnus), Dialogues (Dialogi), Sources Chrétiennes 251/260, De Vogüé, A. (ed.), Paris 1978/1979. Honée, E., Willibrord: Asceet en geloofsverkondiger. De lijn van zijn leven en de structuur van zijn levenswerk, Zoetermeer 1995. Mönnich, C.W., Martinus van Tours, Amsterdam 1962. Nissen, P.; Rose, E., Het leven van de heilige Martinus, Kampen 1997. Reischmann, H.-J., Willibrord: Apostel der Friesen, Darmstadt 1989. Stancliffe, C., St. Martin and his Hagiographer, Oxford 1983. Sulpice Sévère (Sulpicius Severus), Vie de Saint Martin (Vita Martini), Sources Chrétiennes 133, Fontaine, J. (ed.), Paris 1967. Sulpicius Severus, Sulpicii Severi Libri qui supersunt (Dialogi), Corpus Christianorum Scriptorum Latinorum 1, C. Halm (ed.), Wenen 1866. Van Dam, R., Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley 1985.

11. ‘ERANT ENIM SINE DEO VERO’: ICONOCLASH IN APOCRYPHAL AND LITURGICAL APOSTLE TRADITIONS OF THE MEDIEVAL WEST* Els Rose (Utrecht University) Introduction As founders of the Christian church, the apostles are important protagonists of iconoclash in medieval narrative and liturgical traditions. The apostolic missionary activity after Pentecost is, in the case of most apostles, not described in the canonical New Testament. However, extracanonical sources add to our knowledge of early Christian traditions on the founding work of the apostles. Moreover, in the collective and public liturgical cult of the apostles, their contribution to the foundation of the worldwide ecclesia is an important theme. In the following, some lines of comparison will be drawn between apocryphal narratives on the one hand and liturgical sources on the other, with respect to the medieval Latin traditions. In this consideration of apocryphal and liturgical material the focus will be on the clash between the apostle as representative of the new, Christian religion, and forces that are represented as endangering that religion. Since the latter are usually presented in Christian texts as demonic powers, it seems t to study the texts under consideration against the background of medieval traditions of demonology. This will enable us to depict a certain transformation in approaches to the demoniacal. As far as terminology is concerned, a word of caution is of importance: given the fact that we are dealing with textual sources originating in a Christian context, the representatives of the non-Christian religion are pejoratively depicted as ‘idols’, ‘demons’, and ‘magicians’. Despite the prejudiced connotation of this terminology, I will maintain it without further apology, aware of its one-sided perspective.

* I wish to thank dr Ineke van ’t Spijker for her careful reading of this article and for her useful comments. I am also indebted to Hans Peterse for revising the English text.

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The world of medieval Christianity was threatened by demons in numerous ways. As a framework, I will rst discuss four main manifestations of demonic power in a Christian environment, and then focus on the occurrence of two of these in apocryphal and liturgical apostle traditions of the (early) medieval period. Clearing the path for the new religion Before such a thing as a ‘Christian environment’ could come into existence, the eld had to be cleared from the powers and gods worshipped in the local tradition. Demons inhabited images of idols, and from there exercised power over their people. At least, that is how the situation is depicted by the missionaries of the new religion. In the Latin apocryphal traditions, the apostle is rst and foremost the founder of the new, ‘true’ religion of Christianity. Upon arrival in the mission area he had been sent to at the divisio apostolorum after Pentecost, the apostle entered into combat with the local gods. The Christian community and demonic powers from outside Once a Christian community was founded the hostile powers of demons were not expelled denitively. The young congregation was threatened from outside by all kinds of demonic temptations, and had to be armed against them. Baptismal candidates had to go through elaborate rites of exorcism and rejection of the devil before they were allowed to be baptized (cf. Jeanes 1999). After baptism, the sign of the cross and other ritual and spiritual armament remained indispensable throughout life. The monastery a spotless place Once the process of Christianization bore fruit and the number of churches in the landscape increased, the need was felt to cleanse the inner-Christian world from within. From this point of view, the development of monastic life in the early medieval period can be seen as a movement of purication. Although monastic values such as a chaste way of life counted in general for every Christian, a growing division became visible between those who lived ‘in the world’ and those who radically and consistently ‘rejected the world’ by withdrawing within

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the safe enclosure of the monastery (cf. Kardong 1988, 41–62, esp. 47; Diem 2005, 200 and 316–319). ‘The world’ was no longer dened as the ‘pagan’ world, inhabited by those who were not (yet) baptized—the circle was drawn much more narrowly. Everything outside the monastery belonged to ‘the world’, however ‘Christian’ that world might have become. Only the monastery offered adequate protection against the attacks of demons and the devil. The devil within: heretics and dissidents At the same time the attacks of evil became a threat from within. Deviant movements formed a frightful menace to the Christian community. Representatives of such movements were styled heretics and presented as demoniacs—‘heresy is represented as the work of the Devil’ (Kienzle 1998, 259–278, esp. 269; cf. Russell 1992, 79). The fourfold manifestation of the demoniacal shows a distinction between the combat of the Christian community and its (hostile) environment on the one hand, and the internal struggle between the powers of good and evil within a Christianized environment on the other (cf. Rubellin 1990, 265–272, esp. 269). Rubellin notices a chronological shift: rst he signals the combat with demonic powers as the combat of the Christian community with the outside world; then the struggle with demons becomes a reection of a Christian community turned inward and dealing with its internal organization. A third battle eld could be added: the individual Christian’s soul. In the following study of Latin apocryphal Acts of the apostles and the incorporation of this legendary material in later, liturgical texts, the focus will be on the rst and the third battle elds. The combat between apostles and demons as represented by the texts under consideration shows a certain transformation: from the combat with demons as an iconoclash between different religious communities, to the struggle with demonic powers as a representation of iconoclash within the Christian community, even within the soul of the Christian individual. Apostles and demons: apocryphal and liturgical sources One of the most important entries to apocryphal traditions on the apostles in the Latin world is a compilation of apostle legends generally indicated as ‘the collection of Pseudo-Abdias’. This set of texts, erroneously ascribed to a rst century bishop of Babylon named Abdias,

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was widely known and very popular in the Middle Ages. Still, the material and its inner coherence is surrounded by questions. Ever since an anonymous compiler in the sixth century put the Virtutes et passiones apostolorum together into a collection, these Latin ‘Acts of the apostles’ appear as a certain unity in the manuscripts, while their original mutual coherence is still a matter of discussion. The transmission of the material is complicated since not only the collection as a whole is found in manuscripts, but the chapters on each individual apostle were also widely spread in many codices. This situation makes the collection a difcult object of study. The lack of a reliable critical edition further compounds the difculties.1 The appearance of demons is a recurring theme in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias, as it is in early medieval hagiography in general (cf. Diem 2005, 299; Brown 1981, 106–118). In the Latin Acts of Apostles representations of the religious other, and thereby consequently as the inimical other, appear in various forms. The hostile god, depicted as a demonic power, can take shape as a pagan god, a statue or idol, a dragon, a sorcerer, or a human being possessed by a demon. In this way, the phenomenon can be considered a topos. This is how Brossard-Dandré and Alibert see it (Brossard-Dandré 2000, 195–205, esp. 202–203; Alibert 2000, 207–226, esp. 220–222). Yet even given this topos-character, a further consideration may be worthwhile of the representation of idols and demons in apocryphal texts, and of the reception and transformation of these traditions within the living liturgical cult of the apostles. This will help us to chart early medieval ways of constructing and dening religious identity. In the following, the clash of apostle and demon in apocryphal and liturgical texts will be studied for the case of ve exemplary apostles: Bartholomew, Philip, Matthew, and Simon & Jude. Concerning the apocryphal sources we take the collection of Pseudo-Abdias as point of departure. With regard to liturgical texts, we follow the apostles in the development of their cult in the Latin church, which may lead us to a variety of traditions and time periods within the liturgy of the medieval West.

1 In the following I will refer to the texts as the ‘Collection of Pseudo-Abdias’, or, shortly ‘Pseudo-Abdias’ and to its edition in the versions of Nausea (1530) and Fabricius (1719, the latter following Lazius’ edition of 1552). See on the discussion G. Besson: ‘La collection dite du Pseudo-Abdias: un essai de dénition à partir de l’étude des manuscrits’, in Apocrypha 11 (2000) 181–194; É. Junod & J.-D. Kaestli (ed.): Acta Iohannis. CCSA 2 (Turnhout 1983) 750–757.

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Bartholomew and the god Astaroth The apocryphal traditions of Bartholomew’s trials and tribulations take place in and around the temple of the god Astaroth in India, the region where he was sent to preach the gospel.2 According to the Latin version of Bartholomew’s Passio in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias, the god Astaroth deluded the people by rst making them ill, and subsequently healing them after they had answered his demand to make offerings to him. This same theme of idols deceiving the people with fake illnesses and false cures recurs in the account of other apostles in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias (cf. Bartelink 1994, 21, 29). It marks a clear delineation between the deceitful promises of the ancient gods, and the ‘true’ salvation that is brought by the agent of the new, Christian God, a salvation that is presented deliberately as a release from the bonds of the old religion. The theme goes back to Old Testament images of the God of the Hebrews and the gods of the gentes (e.g. Ps. 113/115). In the Passio Bartholomaei the power of the ancient god takes on various shapes. It is not only represented as a visible and tangible statue or idol, but also as a demon possessing humans. Bartholomew’s liturgical cult spread in the Latin world after the arrival of his relics in the South of Italy at the end of the sixth century. Sources for the liturgy of the Eucharist as well as the oldest sources for the liturgy of hours betray the development of this cult between the eighth and eleventh centuries through various translations of relics, in Spain, Italy, the Frankish realm and the British Isles. In all this liturgical material, Bartholomew’s clash with Astaroth plays an important role, as will be demonstrated in the following. Liturgy of the hours The oldest set of chants for the liturgy of hours for Bartholomew’s feast-day on 25 August is preserved in the Antiphonary of Ivrea, dated to the eleventh century (Hesbert 1963–1979, I, 293–295). The texts offer an interesting example of the way in which apocryphal material is incorporated into the liturgy. The antiphons and responses tell 2 The account on Bartholomew in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias can be dated before 580, the year that saw the translation of the apostle’s relics to Lipari (Southern Italy), since no mention is made of this event. See Lipsius 1883–1890, II.2, 71. The text of the Passio is found in M. Bonnet: Passio sancti Bartholomaei apostoli in id: Acta apostolorum apocrypha II.1 (Hildesheim 1972), pp. 128–150.

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in their own way the story of the apostle’s journey in India and his performance in Astaroth’s temple. The chants follow the Passio closely, even verbatim, e.g. in their representation of demonic powers as exponents of the ‘other religion’. A clear example can be found in the rst response for the second nocturn—one of the three vigils of which the night ofce consists: Responsorium Praecepto apostoli, destructis a daemone simulacris, regi dixit beatus Bartholomaeus: Ego jussi daemonibus quassare idola, ut gentes verum credant deum qui regnat in coelis. Versus Propterea profanas imagines comminui, et ipsum daemonem ire in desertum praecepi. (Hesbert 1963–1979, I, 293) Resp. After the demons had destroyed their own images by order of the apostle, the blessed Bartholomew said to the king: ‘I have ordered the demons to break their idols to pieces so that the gentiles believe the true God who reigns in heaven. V. Therefore I have broken the profane images, and I have commanded the demon itself to go away into the desert.’

In this chant, exemplary for the ofce of Bartholomew, the clash between Bartholomew and the daemones and idola is situated in the context of the struggle for the right god (verum deum), to which the gentiles (gentes) should convert. This text ts not only in the context of early Medieval Latin apocryphal traditions on apostles, but in a wider Jewish-Christian tradition of credentes and gentes. The rst antiphon of the third nocturn conrms this connection: Antiphona Clamabat plebi apostolus: Audite verum Deum, Creatorem vestrum, qui in coelis habitat; et nolite in lapidibus credere vanis. Psalmus Contebimur Antiphona Ut jussu apostoli cuncta daemon idola comminuit, credentes clamabant populi: Unus Deus, quem praedicat Bartholomaeus. Psalmus Dominus regnavit exultet (Hesbert 1963–1979, I, 293) Ant. The apostle called to the people: ‘Listen to the true God, your Creator who lives in heaven, and do not believe in idle stones’. Ant. As soon as the demon had broken all idols by order of the apostle, the people believed and cried: ‘There is one God, and Bartholomew is his preacher’.

The comparison of the representatives of the old religion to stones (lapides) can be connected directly to Ps. 113 (115), where the fakeness and falseness of the gods of the gentiles is sharply contrasted with the God of the Hebrews. Like this psalm, the chant reects the superiority of the god qui regnat in coelis over ‘handmade gods’.

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Prayers for the Eucharist in Spain, Italy and England The material for the liturgy of the hours in commemoration of Bartholomew remains very close to the apocryphal text in representing the clash between apostle and demon as a clash between old and new religion. A different approach is evinced by the material for the Eucharistic liturgy of Bartholomew’s feast-day. Spain The prayers for mass in a Spanish book for the Eucharist, the Liber Mozarabicus Sacramentorum, can serve as an example. Although the manuscript in which this sacramentary is transmitted dates to the ninth century, the prayers go back at least to the seventh century (Cabrol 1935, 390–419, esp. 407). The mass for Bartholomew in this book pays much attention to the apostle’s ability to throw out demons and to bind them miraculously. In the rst part of the Eucharistic prayer, the inlatio (LMS 843),3 Bartholomew is presented as a model apostle, supporting his teaching of the Christian doctrine with miracles, and honouring it with his own blood. Showing his miraculous acts to the people, he silenced the idol Astaroth. The prayer commemorates how Bartholomew threw out the demons ‘on the authority of Christ’ and following the latter’s example (Exemplis sequens dominum Iesum Christum, imperio suo demonia eiicit). The prayer then refers to the way the apostle sentenced the demons to the chains and forced them to speak the truth, and how he destroyed the idols by the power of his word. The inlatio also recollects Bartholomew’s willingness to submit himself to suffering when he fell into the hands of the demon’s adherents. The image of chains (catena) recurs many times in the Spanish liturgical prayers that praise the apostle for his power over the demons. Bartholomew compels the demons to tell the truth about their delusive acts of causing illness and faking healing (veritatem predicare demones inperat). After the demons’ confession, Bartholomew encourages and helps the people to destroy the idol and its temple, and to replace it, with the help of an angel, by a templum dedicated to the name of Christ (verbo simulacra confringit; templum Astaroth a demonibus reddidit liberum, illudque tibi consecrauit per spiritum

3 ‘Prayer of sacrice’, the rst part of the Eucharistic prayer, preceding the sung Sanctus. Since the text is too long to reproduce it in its full length, only fragments are given here. See for the entire prayer the edition by Janini 1982–1983, I, 296–301.

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sanctum). The people are presented as active participants in the destruction of the old religion, represented as slavery, and in the foundation of the new religion, represented as freedom. Italy In the liturgy of southern Italy, Bartholomew’s cult ourished since the ninth century. In the Beneventan Sacramentary—which developed in the tenth and eleventh centuries and was transmitted in a late-eleventh century manuscript (Gamber 1957, 265–285, esp. 265)—the oratio secreta (prayer following the offertory) of the mass for Bartholomew’s natale is of special importance: Oratio secreta Deus, qui exorante apostolo tuo Bartholomeo demoni precepisti suum funditus diruere simulacrum, peccatorum imagines a nostris mentibus, quaesumus, expelle propitius, ut eius precibus emundati regni tui ianuam gaudenter introire mereamur. Per. (Rehle 1972, 128) God, who on the prayer of your apostle Bartholomew has commanded the demon to destroy its own image by the roots, mercifully expel, we beseech you, the images of sins from our hearts, so that we may be deemed worthy to enter with joy through the door of your kingdom, puried through his prayers. Through [Christ] . . .

In this text, the demons are compared to the images of sins in the hearts of the faithful, which Bartholomew may expell just as he knocked over the idols. The idol that served in the apocryphal narrative as a representation of the outside non-Christian world has, in the liturgical text, developed into a mental demon. Thus the prayer illustrates the transformation of the representation of the demoniacal as a barrier between different religious communities into an imagination of sins ( peccatorum imagines) in the heart (mens) of the individual Christian. England The same transformation is visible in a prayer of English origin, found in the Benedictional of the church of Canterbury. This compilation of episcopal blessings for Mass is dated to the second quarter of the eleventh century (Woolley 1917, xxv). Item alia benedictio Deus, qui apostolos non seruos sed amicos suos uoluit uocare, pretioso apostolo suo Bartholomeo exorante, a seruitute peccati uos dignetur liberare, et uirtutum libertate ditare. Amen.

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Omne malum a uobis arceat benignissime, qui Indos indomitos deo subdidit uictoriosissime. Amen. Placeat sibi pro uobis interuenire, qui roseo cruore perfusus uictor meruit caelos subire. Amen. Quod ipse prestare dignetur. (Woolley 1917, 107) May God, who wanted to call his apostles not his servants but his friends, through the prayer of his precious apostle Bartholomew, deign to liberate you from the servitude of sin and enrich you with the liberty of virtue. Amen. And may he benevolently turn away from you all evil, who victoriously subjected the untamed Indians to God. Amen. May it please him to make intercession for you, who was deemed worthy to proceed towards heaven as a victor besprinkled with rose-colored blood. Amen.

Again the evil that was expelled by Bartholomew, who victoriously subjected the ‘untamed Indians’ to his God, is imagined in this liturgical text as the believer’s (inner) evil: sin (seruitus peccati). Philip and the god Mars The appearance of the religious other in the form of an idol or statue in honour of a certain god also occurs in the account on the apostle Philip in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias (Fabricius 1719, 736–742). Philip, preaching the gospel in Scythia, encounters a lively cult of the god Mars. The story in Pseudo-Abdias follows the usual scheme of the Christian missionary forced by local religious leaders to make an offering to the local god. Thus Philip is compelled to offer to Mars, but he unmasks the statue as the dwelling place of an evil dragon. The dragon, coerced by the apostle to leave the idol, kills some people and causes the others to fall ill. Philip promises to cure the sick and raise the dead, provided that the people destroy the statue and build a church instead. Thus the people themselves are involved in the clash and destruction of icons. They are not passively converted but actively reject the old devotion by destroying its icons and turn to the new religion by building its dwelling place: a church. In the Virtutes Philippi the foundation of the church is conrmed by the installation of a hierarchical ministry: Philip appoints priests, deacons and a bishop before he leaves Scythia on the command of a vision to continue his mission elsewhere. Within the liturgy the apostle Philip is commemorated together with his companion James Minor, the ‘brother of the Lord’, on 1 May. The

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reason for their shared celebration in all Latin liturgical calendars must be the twin dedication of a church in Rome to which relics of the apostles were brought in the sixth century, since there is no earlier legendary tradition that connects the two. The church for Philip and James was built under popes Pelagius I (556–561) and John III (561–574), and later rededicated as the Church of the Twelve Apostles (Kennedy 1938, 104). Prayers for the celebration of the Eucharist or chants for the liturgy of hours on the feast-day of Philip and James do not pay much attention to apocryphal details concerning the apostles. The most eyecatching liturgical text in honour of Philip alone is a Mozarabic hymn (Fulget coruscans) transmitted in a Spanish hymnary of the tenth century (Blume 1897, 228–230). In short but clear strokes the hymn sketches the apostle’s life and death, concentrating in six of the eleven stanzas on Philip’s combat with Mars and the evil dragon, and on his miracles of healing and raising the dead; on the building of a cross and a church, and, nally, on the people’s conversion. In this, the hymn neatly follows the Latin Acts of Philip/Virtutes Philippi as they are transmitted in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias. In the second stanza Philip’s arrival in Scythia and his encounter with the dragon in the statue of Mars is described. Then the miracles with which Philip conquered the dragon are depicted, followed by the iconoclash of idol and cross, temple and church: 3. Fiunt virtutes per manus apostoli: Duo tribuni, quos dracos prostaverat, Seu lius sacricans ponticis Recuperabant prospera libertatis Et reddunt Deo gratias multimodas. Miracles happened through the hand of the apostle: Two tribunes, whom the dragon had overthrown, And the son of the priest, making the offering, They all regained the good fortune of liberty And gave multiple thanks to God. 4. In locum dirum, quo draco steterat, Benigne iussit, ut vexilla collocent, Virtutes magnas imperat acquirere; Tunc draco ipse, qui praeerat saevius, In Christi laudem solitudo permanet. In the fearful place where the dragon had been standing [Philip] benignly commanded to raise a cross,

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He ordered to obtain great powers; Then this very dragon, who had ruled so savagely, Remained [in] solitude in praise of Christ. 7. Post haec beatus vocat ad se populos, Levitas iubet, sacerdotes eri, Deorum templa nimia destruere Ecclesiarumque sancta erigere, Haereticorum de errore redire. After that the blessed man called the people to him, He ordered them to become deacons and priests, and made them to destroy the enormous temples of the gods And to erect holy churches; and to return from the error of the heretics.

As in the apocryphon, the people are introduced as an active party in the struggle between old and new religion, the former, remarkably, being presented as the error of heretics (haereticorum de errore). The liturgical text remains very close to the apocryphal source in its depiction of the triumph of Christianity, representative of benecent freedom ( prospera libertatis) over the old religion, representative of slavery, delusion and savagery. Contrary to the Eucharistic prayers in the case of the apostle Bartholomew, no explicit connection is made between the yoke of demons and the chain of sins, though the hymn concludes with two stanzas (9 and 10) that ask for the intercession of the apostle and the deliverance from sin. Matthew and the Magicians According to the Passio Matthaei in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias, Matthew’s mission eld is located in Ethiopia (Fabricius 1719, 636– 668). There he encounters the two magicians Zaroës and Arphaxat, who are venerated as gods by the Ethiopian king and his people. The magicians are presented in the same way as the ‘demons’ in the Passio Bartholomaei, viz. as deluding powers, ‘enchanting’ the people so that they become paralyzed, and freeing them from this possession as if they were thaumaturges. Matthew, by contrast, is depicted as the one who lays bare the sorcerers’ delusions by curing and liberating the people from their iniction, with the support of the sign of the cross ( facto signo Domini). Although the magicians try to overawe Matthew and his growing ock with foul dragons, Matthew chases the demonic

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creatures away ‘in the name of my Lord Jesus Christ’. Matthew, then, is seen as a god by the Ethiopians, but he ercely denies this: ‘I am not God, but a servant of my Lord Jesus Christ, the son of almighty God, who sent me to you so that you would abandon the deviation of your idols and be converted to the true God’ (Ego deus non sum, sed servus domini mei Jesu Christi, lii dei omnipotentis, qui me misit ad vos, ut relicto errore simulachrorum vestrorum, ad verum deum convertamini) (Fabricius 1719, 652). The apostle urges the people to be converted and to build a church. Thus happens; the church is dedicated to the Resurrection and the magicians are chased to Persia. The rst signs of a liturgical cult of the apostle Matthew in the West are seen towards the end of the fth century. Relics of the apostle were brought to Italy around the middle of the tenth century (De Gaifer 1962, 92). Although liturgical texts for Matthew’s feast-day on 21 September often concentrate on Matthew as an apostle, martyr or evangelist, there are some interesting prayers that focus on Matthew’s encounters with the Ethiopians and their local gods. The prayers for Matthew’s feast-day in the Spanish Liber Mozarabicus Sacramentorum clearly reect the development of the imagery of the struggle between the Christian religion and local cults in a liturgical context. The victory of the apostle over the magi as well as his power to raise the dead is transformed in these liturgical texts into a power over ‘the grave of sins’. A fragment of the prayer post nomina, recited after the names of the members of the community are read aloud, may serve as an example: 940 Post nomina. Via, ueritas et uita, qui incarnari uoluisti ut redimeres uniuersa: redime nos a chirographo delictorum, sancti tui Mathei apostoli et euangeliste, nec non et martyris prece. Qui Eufranonem puerem inuocatione nominis tui suscitauit a mortuis, suscitet nos, quesumus, a uitiorum nostrorum sepulcris; quique dum deus putaretur, non se esse deum, sed dei seruum ueridica uoce referre non distulit, et ut putantes ad te deum conuerterentur, relicto simulacrorum errore, instanter ac fortiter predicauit, ad te nobis redeundi post lapsus aditum prestet, nosque in ueritate quam predicauit stabiles faciat. Suscitet mortuorum in sceleribus corda, qui morticata suscitauit celeriter puerilia membra ( Janini 1982–1983, I, 343–344). [Prayer] after the recitation of the names. O way, truth, and life, you who wanted to dwell in the esh in order to redeem the whole world: redeem us from the bonds of sin, through the prayer of your holy Matthew, apostle and evangelist, and also martyr. May he who raised the boy Eufranos from the dead by the invocation of your name, we beseech you, raise us from the graves of our sins; and may he—who, when they thought he was a God, did not delay to proclaim with a word of truth

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that he was not God but a servant of God, and who immediately and strongly started to preach so that they, believing, would convert to you, o God, after they had abandoned the error of their idols—may he grant us access to return to you after our falling away from you, and may he make us strong in the truth that he has preached. May he raise the hearts of those who are dead because of their sins, who raised quickly the dead body of the boy.

Although the magicians as such are not mentioned in this text, they are present at the background, since according to the Passio they stood helplessly at the deathbed of the king’s son Eufranos with no power to raise him from the dead. Matthew, however, brought the boy back to life, by which he convinced the king of his superiority over the old gods. In the liturgical text, the dead boy is a symbol of the world of sins by which the Christian faithful are surrounded, and the apostle’s life giving power stands for the liberation from this sinful existence. The power of the apostle to raise the dead to life is explicitly compared to the apostle’s ability to keep the Christian faithful free from sin. Simon & Jude and the end of the Magicians Matthew managed to expel the magicians Zaroës and Arphaxat from the land of the Ethiopians to Persia, but he did not eliminate them. The couple returns in the Passio of Simon & Jude, celebrated as twins in martyrdom in the Western tradition ever since the early Middle Ages (Kellner 1911, 224). The sixth century Latin Passio Simonis et Iudae as transmitted in the collection of Pseudo-Abdias tells us about the wanderings of the apostles through the twelve provinces of Persia before they came to the city Suanir, where they died (Fabricius 1719, 608–636). Before their martyrdom the apostles were engaged in a long and erce battle with the magicians, a long-drawn-out struggle that ended in the death of both parties. The magicians’ fate is described as a miserable and dishonourable destruction by re; that of the apostles as their victory and glorication in martyrdom. The way liturgical texts, used for the commemoration of Simon & Jude, deal with apocryphal material concerning these apostles is comparable to the case of Bartholomew. In various liturgical traditions the apocryphal narrative has had great inuence. From the early Middle Ages onwards Simon & Jude shared a feast-day on 28 October. Relics of the couple were kept in Rome, and relics of Jude alone in Reims and Toulouse (Peretto 1961–1969, 1152). As in the case of Bartholomew,

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the chants for the liturgy of the hours in commemoration of Simon & Jude have incorporated a large amount of material drawn from the apocryphal tradition. The chants accompanying the singing of psalms and the recitation of biblical and legendary readings reect the clash between the apostles and the magicians as their opponents. They follow the text of the Passio very closely. As in the case of Bartholomew, a different picture is provided by the prayers for the Eucharist, where the combat between apostle and demon is given a spiritual interpretation. Whereas the earliest Gallican liturgical sources do not provide a mass in honour of the apostles, the Mozarabic tradition does. A fragment of a manuscript composed in Toledo and dated by some to the ninth century (Gamber, Pinell), by others to the rst half of the thirteenth century (Mundó) presents a mass for both of the apostles.4 In the prayers of this mass the apostles are celebrated as glorious martyrs, perfect followers of their Master, as well as teachers of the truth of the Christian doctrine. As was the case in the Mozarabic mass for Matthew, the prayer Post nomina explicitly connects the apostles’ power over demons with the deliverance from sin: ‘. . . And you who have given them the power to throw out demons through the Holy Spirit, grant us to always have a pure heart and a righteous spirit before you’ (. . . Et qui illis dedisti potestatem eiciendi demonia per spiritum sanctum, tribue nobis ad te semper habere cor mundum et spiritum rectum—Janini 1982–1983, I, 539). The inlatio focuses not only on the apostles’ power over ‘demons’ and those who venerated these ‘idols’, but also stresses the contempt Simon & Jude showed for all material wealth of this world ( Janini 1982–1983, I, 540–541). In the introductory prayer before the Pater noster these two characteristics are connected in a way that stresses the apostles’ exemplary function for the Christian congregation of that age: 1485 Ad orationem Dominicam Omnis conuentus aeclesiae, qui tolerantiam et uirtutem sanctorum apostolorum et martyrum Symonis et Iude audistis, mentis oculos mecum in intima ducite, et quid contemptus mundi ualeat, pie perpendite. Ecce diuitie dantur et respuuntur; ecce uindicandi de persecutoribus licentia conceditur, et contemnitur. Et hinc est quod demonibus imperandi facultas et nitur et obtinetur. Non alias namque diabolus uincitur, quam cum mundus cum suis opibus temnitur. Respuamus

4 Spain deviates from the tradition of a natale of Simon and Jude on 28 October, and chooses the nineteenth instead. See for a discussion of and literature on the manuscript fragment Janini 1982–1983, II, xxi and 303–305.

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igitur temporalia, ut deuicto diabolo premia possimus perfrui sempiterna. Et orationem quam nos docuit habitator in celis, libere possimus clamare e terris: Pater noster qui es . . . ( Janini 1982–1983, I, 541) You, the entire congregation of the church, who have heard the forbearance and the virtue of the holy apostles and martyrs Simon and Jude, turn the eyes of your mind with me into the inner secrets, and consider carefully and piously what the contempt of this world is worth. Behold, riches are given and rejected, behold, the freedom to be delivered from the persecutors is given and despised. And hence it is that the power of the demons to rule is nished and retained. For the devil is only conquered when the world with all its riches is despised. Let us therefore reject what is temporary, so that we can enjoy the eternal reward after the devil is conquered, and can freely call from the earth the prayer that we are taught by him who dwells in heaven: Our Father in heaven . . .

It is important to note that the Spanish prayers for the apostles are almost unique in their incorporation of legendary material on the apostles. Although prayers belonging to the Roman and the later Frankish tradition do refer to the apostles’ martyrdom and victory over death, they are far less explicit in this matter. Nowhere is the connection between the apostles’ victory over the representatives of local religious cults and the struggle against the power of sin within the Christian community itself so clear as in these Spanish texts, well known for their narrative character. Conclusion The representation of the combat between apostles and demons shows similar patterns in the cases of Bartholomew and the god Astaroth, Philip and the god Mars, Matthew and the Persian magicians Zaroës and Arphaxat and Simon & Jude and the same sorcerers. The liturgical texts used during the feast-days of these apostles are to a great extent inuenced by apocryphal traditions. The struggle with the powers of ‘the other religion’, personied as idols, demons and magicians, plays a signicant role in Eucharistic liturgy as well as in the texts for the liturgy of the hours. All day long the Christian community celebrated the victory of the apostles over the representatives of ‘idolatry’. Gradually this victory received a different layer of meaning: while idolatry initially stood for ‘the local, non-Christian religion’, the power of the apostles over the delusions of idols, demons and magicians is represented in many liturgical texts as a support against the temptation of sin. This

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shift in meaning is more apparent in the prayers for the Eucharist than in the chants of the ofce. The reason for this contrast probably lies in the difference between these liturgical ‘genres’: the chants of the liturgy of hours function as companions to psalms and readings and in that sense highlight the main aspects of existing texts, whereas the prayers of mass are comparatively free compositions for the liturgy, containing a proper interpretation of the central themes of the feast-day. The liturgical texts that were used to commemorate the apostles on their dies natale are expressions of iconoclash between different religious world-views. They also represent an internal clash of idols and icons, illustrating a characteristic of medieval Christian thinking, in which temporary and earthly goods are rejected for the benet of eternal bliss. Combat with idols and demons is a continuous process in the world of medieval Christianity, be it the struggle of a community to defend its borders against external and internal threats, or the ongoing effort of an individual to stay free from sin. Traditions about the apostles, originating in the ancient world, are used time and again to instruct the Christian of the medieval age. Apocryphal traditions, although they were sometimes approached with hesitation and repudiation, were also considered as apt material to express the veneration of these saints in the liturgy. The way the apostles were represented in apocryphal traditions, viz. as builders and founders of the church, was still considered useful to instruct the people of God in the medieval era and therefore found its place in medieval ecclesiastical traditions of worship. LITERATURE Alibert, D., ‘Vision du monde et imaginaire dans quelques textes de la collection dite du Pseudo-Abdias’, in: Apocrypha 11 (2000) 207–226. Bartelink, G.J.M., ‘De demonologie van het vroege christendom’, in: Rooijakkers, G., Dresen-Coenders, L., Geerdes, M. (eds), Duivelsbeelden. Een cultuurhistorische speurtocht door de Lage Landen (Baarn 1994) 21–53. Blume, C. (ed.), Die mozarabischen Hymnen des alt-spanischen Ritus (Leipzig 1897; repr. New York/Londen 1961 = Analecta Hymnica 27). Bonnet, M. (ed.): Passio sancti Bartholomaei apostoli, in id: Acta apostolorum apocrypha II.1 (Hildesheim 1972) 128–150. Brossard-Dandré, M., ‘La collection du Pseudo-Abdias. Approche narrative et cohérence interne’, in: Apocrypha 11 (2000) 195–205. Brown, P., The cult of the saints (Chicago 1981). Cabrol, F., ‘Mozarabe (liturgie)’, in: Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie 12 (Paris 1935) 390–491.

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De Gaifer, B., ‘Hagiographie salernitaine. La translation de S. Matthieu’, in: Analecta Bollandiana 80 (1962), 82–110. Diem, A., Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster 2005). Fabricius, J.A. (ed.), Codex apocryphus Novi Testamenti (Hamburg 1719). Gamber, K., ‘Die mittelitalienisch-beneventanischen Plenarmissalien. Der Messbuchtypus des Metropolitangebiets von Rom im 9./10. Jahrhundert’, in: Sacris Erudiri 9 (1957) 265–285. Hesbert, R.-J., Corpus antiphonalium ofcii (Rome 1963–1979). Janini, J. (ed.): Liber missarum de Toledo (Toledo 1982–1983). Jeanes, G., ‘Baptism Portrayed as Martyrdom in the Early Church’, in: Ferguson, E. (ed.), Forms of Devotion. Conversion, Worship, Spirituality, and Asceticism (New York 1999 = Recent Studies in Early Christianity: A Collection of Scholarly Essays 5) 62–80. Kardong, T.G., ‘The Devil in the Rule of the Master’, in: Studia monastica 30 (1988) 41–62. Kellner, K., Heortologie oder die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Kirchenjahres und der Heiligenfeste von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg i.B. 1911). Kennedy, L., The Saints of the Canon of the Mass (Rome 1938 = Studi di Antichità 14). Kienzle, B., ‘Holiness and Obedience: Denouncement of Twelfth-Century Waldensian Lay Preaching’, in: Ferreiro, A., The Devil, Heresy and Wichtcraft in the Middle Ages (Leiden 1998) 259–278. Lipsius, R.A., Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten und Apostellegenden (Braunschweig 1883– 1890). Peretto, L.M., ‘Guida Taddeo’, in: Bibliotheca sanctorum (Rome 1961–1969) VI, 1152– 1155. Rehle, S. (ed.), Missale Beneventanum von Canosa (Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS W6) (Regensburg 1972 = Textus patristici et liturgici 9). Rubellin, M., ‘Le diable, le saint et le clerc: deux visions de la société chrétienne au Haut Moyen Age’, in: Sot, M. (ed.): Haut Moyen Age: culture, éducation et société. Études offertes à Pierre Riché (Paris 1990), 265–277. Russell, J.B., Lucifer. The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London 1984/1992). Woolley, R.M. (ed.), The Canterbury Benedictional (British Museum, Harl. Ms. 2892) (London 1917 = Henry Bradshaw Society 51).

12. TANGIBLE WORDS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE NOTION OF PRESENCE IN GOTHIC ART Babette Hellemans (Utrecht University) Introduction The search for a clear and eloquent line as shape represents the possibility of incarnation as a ‘creative act’.1 This article will discuss some problems concerning the movement of this search as a performance, especially in gothic art and texts. Since the topic of this volume is about presence (the ‘icon’) and the loss of presence (the ‘clash’), the examples I have selected will turn around awareness of being and not-being by ocular proof and, analogous to the notion of the Eucharist’s hoc est corpus meum, to seeing and not-seeing. In the rst section of the paper I will introduce the thirteenth century Bibles Moralisées painted in the so-called Muldenfaltenstil in order to make the reader familiar with some typical phenomena of gothic art. As will be shown, these Bibles can be seen as the visual evocation of salvation by means of a conceptual, if not rational framework, consisting of and enveloping the totality of the Christian faith. In the last two sections, I will try to connect the topic thus indicated by giving some examples taken from sources in modern literature and philosophy. I have selected them for the precise way in which they describe the Christian notion of presence. At the end of each section, the relation between the text fragments and gothic art will be made clear.

1 Explanations of some of the distinctions and terminology employed (e.g. the notion of presence and being in relation to Incarnation) can be found in my PhD-thesis, see: Hellemans, 2006). I am very grateful for the comments and careful editorial attention from Willemien Otten.

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Between 1220 and 1230, the best artists of Paris made a remarkable book, probably intended for a member of the French court circles of King Louis VIII and his wife Blanche of Castile (ms. Vienna, ÖNB 2554).2 This book, a so-called Bible Moralisée, is remarkable because of its impressive number of images, organized in a schematic and symmetric layout. It is characterized by the systematic use of eight roundels with “strips” of text next to them (gures 2 and 3 show the lay-out as a typical feature of all four 13th century Bibles Moralisées). It is a Bible, or rather a luxuriously illustrated Bible glossed with commentaries. Both the biblical paraphrases and the commentaries are written in Old French. At approximately the same time a similar but much more extensive manuscript written in Latin was produced (ms. Vienna, ÖNB 1179). In this version, the textual paraphrases are longer and somehow ‘denser’. This Bible was possibly made for the same person to whom the vernacular Bible Moralisée belonged. Some ten years later, two related but much more extensive bibles were produced, consisting of three volumes each (mss. Toledo, Cathedral Treasury, 3 vols. + New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M. 240 and mss. Oxford Bodl. Libr., Bodley 270b + Paris BnF lat. 11560 + London B.L. Harley 1526–1527). They are mainly written in Latin, but parts of the Gospels—composed as a Diatessaron—are bilingual (Latin and Old French) (Bœspug, Zaduska, 2002, 427–445). The four Bibles Moralisées were hardly ordinary picture bibles. They are to be considered as veritable ‘monuments’, incomparable in scale and labour intensiveness to other manuscripts made either before or after (Rouse and Rouse, 2000, 33). In spite of the Bibles Moralisées’ great importance, we still know very little about the creation of these manuscripts. Their use is also largely unknown. These monuments of iconography provided a new symbolic language which greatly inuenced other manuscripts and royal buildings, such as the famous Ste Chapelle in Paris, built for Louis IX.3 Both the Bibles Moralisées and Ste Chapelle

2 With respect to the dating of the manuscripts, I follow Lowden, 2000, see esp. vol. 1, 52. 3 The similarities between the depictions in the Bibles Moralisées and those in the Ste Chapelle have been the subject of many studies, see: Jordan, 2002. See also the numerous articles published by Yves Christe and his team and the recently published ‘Festschrift’ dedicated to him: Hediger 2005.

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represent a milestone in gothic art, especially as regards the conceptual use of space and of time within the framework of the History of Salvation. Let us explore this ‘conceptual use’ a little further, since the notion of presence is of great important here. A ‘reader’ of the stained-glass windows in de Ste Chapelle nds himself instantaneously and literally in a three-dimensional space, whereas in the Bibles Moralisées the effect of a three-dimensional structure is achieved very differently. These Bibles’ spatial idea of time is clearly represented in the systematically organized and repetitive characters of the roundels. They form the heart of the Bibles Moralisées. The repetition of lines evokes echoes, so to speak, thereby creating a spatial or even three-dimensional structure. In this respect, the folio of a Bible Moralisée can be seen as a two-dimensional attempt of presenting the three-dimensional. The roundels, but also the particular pattern of the layout, contribute to a feeling of three-dimensional space. The pattern of circular surfaces alternating with vertical lines triggers a sensation of being lost in space and time, particularly since there is no linear narrative or plot. This sensation is even stronger because of the systematic use of colours either within the roundels or in the background: colour and structure are completely integrated. The spatial context thus has the effect on the reader of blurring the distinction between the present, the past and the future. The result is literally that the only way one can enter in the world of these Bibles Moralisées is by undertaking a performative reading of these books. The systematic presence of eight roundels can also be seen as extending the geometric expressionism of the layout.4 Christian metaphysical thought, especially Augustinian, have inuenced the design of the Bibles.5 If so, the correlation between the number 8 (every folio has eight roundels) and its associations with re-birth according to Platonic geometry is worth exploring further. Adam and Eve were exiled from Paradise on the eighth day (Gen. 3) ‘(on) the journey (that) leads to heaven, that is, to the eighth motion and day.’ This is explained by St Augustine as the eighth day that inaugurated Christ’s resurrection: 4 It is by no means my intention to play with numbers or to hunt for symbols in Scripture. I simply want to show that the making of a Bible Moralisée is not a matter of coincidence and therefore, an understanding of its conception is crucial. For the numerological importance in medieval architecture, see: Krautheimer, 1971, 121–123 and 131–137; the study of Nigel Hiscock (2002, 3–22) provides a broad view on this matter. 5 The Augustinian inuence has already been noticed by Schmitt, 2001, 433.

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babette hellemans What does the eighth day symbolize but Christ, who rose again after the completion of seven days, that is, after the Sabbath [. . .]?’6

Contemplation of a Bible Moralisée thus incites the ‘viewer’ to go beyond the pattern of surfaces and lines to ‘touch’ Divine eternity, just as the eighth day lifts one out of and ‘above’ the rhythm of ordinary time. The reader, being lost in time, becomes consciously redirected towards divine eternity, a sensation evoked by the spatial design shown in a new and an unusual way. Indeed, the Bible Moralisée is most concerned with allegory and more specically the Christological or ecclesiological meaning—what has also been called typology. Again, one cannot generalize: the Bibles Moralisées include the full range of spiritual explanations in an apparently aleatoric way. Because of the fragmented character of these compilations, moreover, we cannot identify the originals of the glosses used by the makers of the Bibles. The impression of a modern scholar might thus be that the medieval scribes worked in a chaotic way. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however. The careful design of the manuscript, its systematic use of colours and lines, clearly point to a purposeful process of execution. Within this design, variation is very well possible and, in general, we should not forget that variety is emblematic for the Middle Ages (Dundes, 1984; Dundes 1999). Analogous to the dynamic in hagiography, patristic writings and other narratives with which we may be more familiar, the role of myth—including the biblical stories understood as such—signals a high degree of participation in the self-understanding of society. For that reason all the above genres show a similar fusion of oral and written traditions. The creation of medieval bibles ts into the same category. It reects a continuous adaptation and transformation of Scripture to contemporaneous standards (Van Uytfanghe, 1984, 449–489). On creation: the refusal of presence Perhaps A la recherche du temps perdu from Marcel Proust (†1923) is mainly known for its delicate way of describing the signicance of objects in the human mind, such as the famous madeleine metaphor which became a standard phrase in French language referring to what Proust called mémoire involontaire. The next passage shows us delicately what one might

6

Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 16.26 and De sermone Domini in Monte 1.4.12.

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analogically call a mémoire créatrice, evoking the subtle movement of a spotless mind out of time and place, towards presence as a creative force. Let us read the following example: Mais à peine le jour—et non plus le reet d’une dernière braise sur une tringle de cuivre que j’avais pris pour lui—traçait-il dans l’obscurité, et comme à la craie, sa première raie blanche et recticative, que le fenêtre avec ses rideaux, quittait le cadre de la porte où je l’avais située par erreur, tandis que pour lui faire place, le bureau que ma mémoire avait maladroitement installé là se sauvait à toute vitesse, poussant devant lui la cheminée et écartant le mur mitoyen du couloir ; une courette régnait à l’endroit où il y a un instant encore s’étendait le cabinet de toilette, et la demeure que j’avais rebâtie dans les ténèbres était allée rejoindre les demeures entrevues dans le tourbillon du réveil, mise en fuite par ce pâle signe qu’avait tracé au-dessus des rideaux le doigt levé du jour/But hardly had daylight itself—and no longer the twinkle from a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for daylight—traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its rst white correcting ray, when the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily xed where the window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to ight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forenger of day.7

Tracing a line in order to create a sign in the beginning of time: this suggestive idea seems to be the same as the realization of the very idea of biblical creation, as indicated in the rst line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. In a next step this beginning of creation literally sees how the day becomes visible in the Gospel of John (1,5), thereby marking the beginning of time: “The light [which is the Word] shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” With the help of visible signs, the artists of the Bibles Moralisées have put “the furniture” in place so as to make for an initial and divine state, which is nothing other than the mental universe rebuilt in the “darkness”—in the same way as Marcel imagined his home. Transcendental signication precedes earthly appearances, and thus signication is privileged with regard to shape itself,

7

Proust, 1999, 153. Author’s translation.

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which shows the transcendental world only partially. The resulting collision has broken up the unity of earth and heaven into two parts, intermingled.8 This breaking is also the very moment in which moral propositions take shape, and the human being nds himself torn between Good and Evil.9 In other words, shape functions as a demarcation of signs (signa) that refer to a true reality (res) which is beyond materiality and the tangible world itself.10 Seen in this way signs are like moments that have acquired shape, and have become materialized. These ‘incarnated signs’ are witnesses of the existence of time, a time that is reminiscent of the Creation and of God’s supremacy. Awakening in the—shady—light of the daybreak is the very moment when everything becomes clear in a light that leaves no room for darkness, and when “materiality” manifests itself by illuminating the underlying structures of a transcendental reality. The darkness has “own away” by means of a simple gesture: “the uplifted forenger of day”, “traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard” to re-use my example from Proust. The unlimited overow of goodness does not allow evil any room and it annihilates all human despair. This is the very message of an eschatological conception of time: the end creates conditions for the beginning of daybreak. To understand this notion of time within the framework of gothic art, we should pay particular attention to the frontispieces of the four Bibles Moralisées. There God is depicted as a deus artifex, an artist of creation (see gures 1 and 4). Now a static approach to both this work of art and its content, which is creation as it is planned and executed, would present us with a linear account running from God designing creation to the last Judgment. Appreciating creation within that context could lead us to see it as acquiring an increasingly independent status, with the secular dimension providing a measure of alienation by being statically opposed to the religious aspect. When interrogating the book as a living, open and complex object, however, the polarity of timelessness

8

Augustin, Confessiones, 13.32.47. I use the definition of shape as evoked by Michael Fried (Fried, 1998, 77): ‘By shape as such I do not merely refer to the silhouette of the support (which is a literary shape), nor merely to the outlines of elements in a given picture (which is a depicted shape). Rather, I regard shape as a medium within which choices about both literal and depicted shapes are not just made, but made mutually responsive’. 10 The theory of signs developed by important thinkers such as Augustine, Anselm, Thomas of Aquinas and Dante states that religious knowledge is always mediated through Christ the Word in this life. See: Colish, 1968, 342. 9

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vanishes. Applied to the example of the deus artifex, this leads us to see him not as isolated but as interactive, as he is actively engaged with the dynamics and temporality of creation. Time itself must be considered a creative act, a performance of the ideal genesis of the cosmos, but it also reects its limits.11 Reading the codex is an entirely dynamic movement since the outcome is not clear beforehand, so we have no alternative but to consider this art object (e.g. the isolated deus artifex) as being an open complex, which allows the readers to dissolve the polarity of timelessness. Only then will the dynamics and temporality of creation begin to vanish, as we realize that we are confronted with a living rather than a frozen object. Only then also will the past create room to break through “as the light at the dawn of creation” to show itself freely in the present.12 Let us now return to the paradox evoked in the previous example of watching the deus artifex at work when opening the Bible Moralisée. The nal state of the object is never seen, or identied, or named by the viewers, because it will always be beside the point. The point is the object itself, i.e. divine creation in its entirety. Considering the object as an open complex implies that the object is always within this act of being made, always moving, always becoming through endless repetition. To put it in another way, if the object’s casting and directing would bring the makers, as it were, ‘back’ to the object as limited in its own boundaries of visibility, its presence there would pull the beams of the eye apart, since nothing is complete and nothing pure causality. With every repetition in the codex, an original is created as well as a repetition with each original creation. If the main characteristic of the Bible Moralisée would be that the object lives, and that this very process of reading as performing is thus as important as the object made, and if that object is itself designed to resist a spatio-temporal identity, how are we to judge the legitimacy of posthumous casts? It would be like searching for a posthumous sound of a voice that has long since become mute. Just as in the Eucharist the breaking of the host symbolizes the ‘totus Christus’, so the broken images of the Bible Moralisée in their never ending stream (see again gures 2 and 3), symbolize the ‘totus mundus’, including but not conning its divine creator. A comparison 11 “[. . .] pour ce qui concerne le temps de l’acte créateur et la genèse idéale du cosmos, mais aussi de leur limite”, in: Chenu, 1960, 30. 12 Presence is a paradox and a crux at the same time in mediating the tangible proof of authenticity into pure sanctity, see: Cordez, 2005, 33–63.

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can be made with the celebration of the Eucharist: it is only through the broken concept of History that the ontology of the Bible Moralisée as a living object can acquire shape and not only its past but also time itself now becomes ‘thinkable’. Time shows itself precisely at the point where history disappears behind the horizon. Approached in this way, the act of creating should be understood in a fully human sense, no longer a mere sign pointing to a reality outside itself, but as an act of the re-creative will, as is the sacrament. On the sacrament: salvation and solitude I will conclude this essay with a passage by the French author François Mauriac (†1970), taken from the second part of the diptych Souffrances et Bonheur du Chrétien, written in 1936. It describes the following scene: Un homme se lève, assiste à la messe, communie. Toutes les heures qui suivent sont baignées de Dieu. Qu’il travaille, qu’il médite, qu’il parle à un ami, la Grâce sacramentale imbibe cette journée, au point que s’il fut jamais enclin à l’ennui, à la terreur de la solitude, l’en voilà guéri à jamais. Etre seul et pourtant n’être pas seul, cette absurde exigence est miraculeusement contentée/A man stands up, attends Mass, receives communion. All hours that follow are bathed in God. When he works, he meditates, he talks to a friend, this day is drowned by sacramental Grace to the extent that if he might be inclined to ennui, the terror of solitude, he will be cured forever. Being alone and still not being alone, this absurd exactingness is satised miraculously.13

In this fragment, Mauriac describes how, in the boundless limits of imagination, of seeing the world in time, the sacrament of the Eucharist represents within the human condition the feeling of deviation, and how this never can be overcome unless its longing is directed at last in the direction of seeing Christ in the world. Here we understand the axiom describing the logical impasse that, in an eschatological sense, being human and having a body implies, as it signies one’s being incarnated in time. Indeed, man is in death when he is alive because he is after death when he is not alive. This impasse concerning time is overlapped by the paradox of Incarnation making the invisible visible and the absent present. In other words, the paradox of Incarnation

13 Quoted by Bessent, 1934, 133. My translation. About the notion of ‘Christian materiality’ Mauriac is known for, see the volume edited by Laurent Déom and JeanFrançois Durant in 2005.

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shows us the boundaries between space, time and being—these are unied in one single gesture.14 It signies the becoming object. In Christian hermeneutics the act of seeing, closely connected to the act of creation (the ‘becoming object’), signies consolation. Perhaps the ecce homo scene described in the Passion of Christ ( John 19,5), is the most revealing example of this. The suspense of the scene as a ‘tableau vivant’ is found in the clash between the suffering Christ surrounded by a spectacle full of garish colours and cruelty, and the almost vacuous act of Pilate: here is the man. The simplicity of the act mufes the noisy crowd, rendering Christ tangible and present as an icon. The clash between appearances and interior truth shows us the human reality. But this dramatic gesture of Pilate evokes at the same time a double movement: not only the crowd is to be silenced, but the presence of the reader of the text and viewer of the scene happens to be, all of sudden, problematic and embarrassing as well. The reader of the Book has become—unwillingly perhaps—an eyewitness. In this realistic introspection entrenched in the Jewish-Christian anthropological narrative of creation, we can properly understand how the notion of presence and the act of seeing coalesce. On the other hand, in order to fully understand the character of the problem Mauriac evokes, his ‘being alone and still not being alone’ as an ‘absurd exactingness’, the notion of not being seen should be claried as well. For this I propose an example from the Old Testament (Ex. 34,2), where Moses’ climbing of the Mount Sinai is described. Here God says to Moses: Chisel out two stone tablets like the rst ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the rst tablets, which you broke. Be ready in the morning, and then come up on Mount Sinai. Present yourself to me there on top of the mountain.

No one is allowed to accompany Moses, not even herds, or animals, living in the mountains. He has to present ‘himself ’, in the early morning, with two pieces of pristine stone in his hand. This is a scene deriving from before creation. It is ‘the rst white correcting ray’, to recall Proust’s example. As a ‘tableau vivant’ the picture is devoid of colours and its reason of existence is not related to any ‘ocular proof ’. The scene is extremely powerful in describing with a minimalistic use 14 The last chapter of my PhD thesis elaborates this problem of human condition more in detail. See: Hellemans, 2006, 133–162.

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of narrative lines the barrenness of Moses’ act of climbing and the signication of not being seen. It demonstrates the terror of solitude and the lack of something ‘tangible’ to fall back on. As we explored in the rst two examples of Proust and the frontispiece of the Bible Moralisée, separateness as the human condition followed by the force of imagination, makes room for the narrative solidity of the testimony: the Word made esh. Or, to cite one of Mauriac’s motto’s: “Le Christ a vaincu la solitude”. At the same time, however, in the centre of this metaphorical thinking, we discover that nothing is a metaphor because the integrity of the biblical narrative (as res), their ‘tangibility’ as acts of God, requires that they belong with the world of imagined mystery, that is, as signs (signa). The intensity of the imagery while sight-reading these Bibles is indeed comparable with acts in liturgy: the presence of performance is unaccompanied by the suggestion of pretending to replace something, that is, inaccessibility remains.15 Sightreading the Word made esh, we glance momentarily a thin invisible line between nature as created and Incarnation; we perceive the birth of Christ as a reminiscence, recalling rhythms and contemplations of the world. But, as we can observe in the selected example (see gure 5), the problem of presence as metamorphosis is to question its nothingness, Christ’s birth being an empty grave. Understanding the Bible Moralisée and gothic art in general is not so much a matter of ‘seeing the world in time’ as broken stones, a fossilized Word to be found in void mountain air or the Word made esh. Because of its rhythm and repetition as a way of reliving the same differently, its signication is not a static bunch of scattered pieces. It is a movement as change instead, similar to a movie that is made by a compilation of ‘frozen shots’. Seeing the world in time is like a metamorphosis, or for that matter, deviation. Through the repetition of the acts of seeing change is now possible: self-conrmation implies a re-incarnation.16 It will hopefully be clear by now that Mauriac’s quote claries my point with great insight: the impossibility of being there at the precise moment when time and materiality acquire space. It is the absence of the observer that is at 15 See Peter Cramer’s sophisticated explanation on the performance of Eucharist as a sign: ‘In fable, the sign, instead of offering the ‘stuff’ out of which the thing is made, is made to stand for the thing, but in a attenuated form. [. . .] the failure, then, is not only in the perception, but in the representations which are its objects; not only in faith, but in the fable faith looks at’, in: Cramer, 1999, 256. 16 This is the conceptual notion of repetition as used by Deleuze, 1968. I mean reincarnation as a repetitive act by celebrating the Incarnation.

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stake. Within a eschatological concept of time, the path of the subject is destined to always cross the path of the object in their mutual time schedules. They will never really meet. Just as the use of hodie in the introitus of Christmas Eve and the First Mass reminds us that Christ’s coming is at hand, so tomorrow morning (mane) we will see. And, arriving at this next morning, lingering between today and tomorrow, the ever returning Incarnation offers us a quasi-repetition of the creation. This is how we should read a Bible Moralisée: as an example of eloquence within a bulging gothic universe. Indeed, whatever the arrangement of the images and words in these Bibles, there is a fusion of Biblical past and ritual present blurring the directions of the thin lines between the hard-edged biblical proofs and their signication, confusing the directions of narrative plot, of today and tomorrow. It is monumentality and a trompe l’oeil at the same time—solitude and salvation together. LITERATURE Primary Literature Augustinus, Confessionum libri XIII (CCSL 27, 1–273). ———, De civitate Dei (CCSL 47, 1–314; 48, 321–866) . ———, Sermones, in: PL 36 (Sancti Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi Opera Omnia, dl.5). Secondary Literature Bessent, E., ‘Solitude in the Novels of François Mauriac, in: The French Review 8 (1934), 133. Boespug, F., Zaduska, Y., ‘Les évangiles dans la Bible Moralisée et le Diatessaron Latin’, in Magistro et Amico, amici discipulique. Lechowi Kalinowskiemu w osiemdziesi\ciolecie urodzin, Kraków, 2002, 427–445. Chenu, M.-D., ‘Situation humaine, corporalité et temporalité’, in: L’homme et son destin d’après les penseurs du moyen âge. Actes du premier congrès international de philosophie médiévale. Louvain-Bruxelles, 28 août–4 septembre 1958, Leuven-Paris, 1960. Colish, M., Mirror of Language, New Haven-London, 1968. Cordez, Ph., ‘Gestion et médiation des collections de reliques au Moyen Age. Le témoignage des authetiques et des inventaires’, in Pecia. Ressources en médiévistique 8/11 (2005), 33–63. Cramer, P., Baptism and change in the early middle ages c. 200–c. 1150, Cambridge, 1999; Deleuze, G., Différence et repetition, Paris, 1968. Déom, L., Durant, J.-F., Littérature et christianisme : L’esthétique de François Mauriac. Actes du colloque de Paris-Sorbonne (20–21 novembre 2003) and Louvain-la-Neuve (24–25 novembre 2003), Paris, 2005. Dundes A., (ed.), Sacred Narrative:Readings in the Theory of Myth, Berkeley, 1984; ———, Holy Writ as Oral Lit. The Bible as Folklore, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford, 1999. Fried, M., Art and objecthood, Chicago-London, 1998.

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Hediger, Chr., (ed.), “Tout le temps du veneour est sanz oyseuseté”. Mélanges offerts à Yves Christe pour son 65ème anniversaire, Turnhout, 2005. Hellemans, B.S., La forme et l’objet du Livre. Une lecture dynamique des Bibles moralisées du XIII e siècle, Utrecht, 2006. Hiscock N., The Wise Master Builder. Platonic Geometry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and Cathedrals, Aldershot, Brookeld e.a., 2002, 3–22. Jordan, A., Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte Chapelle, Turnhout, 2002. Krautheimer, R., ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of medieval Architecture”’, in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, London, 1971, 121–123; 131–137. Lowden, J., The Making of the Bibles Moralisées, London, 2000. Proust, M., A la recherche du temps perdu. vol. I: Du côté de chez Swann. Reimpr. of La Pléiade, Paris, 1999. Rouse, R.H., Rouse, M., Manuscripts and their Makers. Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500, London, 2000. Schmitt, J.-Cl., ‘L’appropriation du futur’, in: Le corps, les rites les rêves, le temps. Essais d’anthropologie médiévale [olim: ‘Appropriating the Future’], Paris, 2001. Van Uytfanghe, M., ‘Modèles bibliques dans l’hagiographie’, in: Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon (eds), Le Moyen Age et la Bible, Paris, 1984, 449–489.

13. CATHARS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE DIVINE: CHRISTIANS OF THE INVISIBLE1 Anne Brenon (Centre d’Études Cathares, Carcassonne) Introduction When the heretic came across a picture of St Mary, he would say to me, mocking the statue: ‘Give some money to this Mariette’.The human heart, he said, is the true Church of God; but the material church is worthless, and these images of Christ and saints which are seen in it are idols . . . .2

These comments, as related by a witness to inquisitor Jacques Fournier, come from the ‘Good Man’ Guilhem Bélibaste; they illustrate perfectly the Cathars’ position on the Catholic cult of saints and images, which the heretics called idolatry: they openly mocked and criticised practices they found superstitious. Their own liturgy was starkly simple. Fundamentally docetists, they sought no contact with the divine—God, Christ, even the Virgin Mary—except through the scriptures of the New Testament; they never tried to portray the divine with anthropomorphic representations. Nevertheless, a careful study of textual sources, as well as the scarce remains of a real Cathar imagery which has come down to us, shows that the heretics who were denounced and repressed most vigorously by the medieval papacy, also represent the Christian group who went the furthest in rejecting images. Not only did the Cathars refuse any material framework for their faith or any iconography of the divine, they also rejected all kinds of sacralizations of the visible, that is all representations of the created world, whether animal or vegetal. This evidently originates in their dualist theology of creation, claiming that nothing evil and corruptible, the bad fruit of the bad tree, either belongs to the ‘Kingdom of God’, or can evoke it.

1 Pour la traduction anglaise, merci de tout coeur à Yvette Hedin, Ylva Hagman et Beverly Kienzle. 2 Arnaut Sicres’s testimony before J. Fournier, 1321. Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, in: Duvernoy, 1965, II, 53.

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Catharism, which the papacy denounced and rejected as a heresy, established its religious course—its heretical choice—by identifying itself with the true Church of God in opposition to the usurper, the Roman church. Quite contrary to the common belief that the Cathars represented an outside threat to medieval Christianity,3 recent careful research has shown that they should instead be considered as a religious movement inside the Christian world.4 This, however, does not imply that the heretics might have been no more than some sort of invention or phantasm fabricated by the Roman clerics.5 Certainly the theocratic and militant Gregorian papacy was at the root of the persecuting society.6 In the 11th century, it instigated the denouncement, condemnation and expulsion of Christian heretics, among others (indels, Sarrasins, then Jews, lepers, witches . . .) and little by little it treated them similarly to criminals guilty of divine treason (Prat, 1998). Nevertheless, it is important to notice that these same heretics, in particular those who were identied with the Cathars from the 12th century onwards, did not try to exonerate themselves from this accusation by claiming to be loyal to the Pope and merging themselves into the Roman church. On the contrary, when they were arrested and brought before the ecclesiastical courts at the risk of burning at the stake, they generally acknowledged their difference with courage and claimed that they were the only true Christians, in opposition to the ‘usurpative Roman Church’ that persecuted them and was going to put them to death (Brenon, 2006). The Cathars’ claim to constitute the authentic Church of Christ is clearly visible in textual sources, from before the middle of the 12th century; it is expressed particularly well in Evervin of Steinfeld’s letter to Bernard of Clairvaux datable to 1143.7 The heretics, Christians of the ‘Kingdom of God which is not of this world’, saw in the Roman

3

Such were still Arno Borst’s opinions; A. Borst, 1953. We owe this essential contribution to Duvernoy, 1977. See also Müller, 1986, Aurell, 2005. 5 Recent hypothesis of some French scholars. See Zerner, 1998 and various authors, 2001. 6 I refer to Robert Moore’s studies, in particular Moore, 1987. 7 See Evervin de Steinfeld’s letter to Bernard de Clairvaux, P.L. 182, col. 676–680. English translation by Moore, 1995, 74–78; French translation by Moore, 1995, 74–78 and comment by A. Brenon, 2001, 49–67. 4

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institution the Church of this world, which had made a pact with the world. This design conformed to the opposition between God and this world that they read in the Scripture, particularly in the Gospel and the First Letter of John. This dualism of Churches, reecting a dualism of creations—this lower world and the Kingdom of God—will be vigorously argued throughout Cathar preaching during the more than two centuries of its history. ‘There are two Churches, one ees and forgives; the other possesses and ays’. This is what the Good Man Pèire Autier still preached between 1300 and 1310, echoing the Cathars of the 12th century in the region of Cologne. By claiming to be the authentic Christian Church, the Cathars systematically based their whole critique against the rich and persecuting ‘false Roman church’ (‘which possesses and ays’) on the Bible: especially when rejecting and often mocking superstitious practices, such as the cult of saints and relics, transsubstantiation, and all forms of miraculous intervention. In their view, the statues of saints in churches, as well as statues of Christ and the Virgin, represented idols, the very same idols that the apostles and their successors had destroyed in pagan temples. At the end of the 10th century, the priest Cosmas criticized the Bogomils for refusing to venerate icons and for considering their worship as idolatry (Vaillant, Puech, 1945). All the sources of the Latin anti-heretical polemic, from the Italian anti-Cathar treatises to the chronicles of the crusade against the Albigensians, are unanimous: the Cathars describe all images in churches as idolatry. Still at the beginning of the 14th century, inquisitorial records report the vigorous criticism of the last Cathar preachers against ‘the church of the idols’, which persecuted them, and against its corrupt hierarchy. They also said that the Pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the abbots and the priests do not have the power to forgive sins . . . On the contrary, they are worshipers of idols and false prophets, whose words are bad fruits, that is vanities and lies . . .8

Humour and common sense were easily found on the side of the heretics, who knew how to play with logic. Churches are the houses of idols, they said, referring to the statues of saints that are in churches as idols. And the people who worship these

8 Sermon of the Good Men Pèire and Jaume Autier. Pèire de Gailhac’s testimony before Geoffroy d’Ablis, in Palès Gobilliard, 339–340.

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anne brenon idols are fools, because they themselves made the statues with axes and other iron tools.9

Their criticism related to social realities and refuted altogether the totality of the false Church: rich and persecuting, but also idolatrous and superstitious. And (Guilhem Belibaste said), clerics make people build beautiful churches, and paint them, but they do not want to pay anything; and they have statues made, but these statues are worthless, they are idols. I heard Guilhem Belibaste say that God’s Son had said: ‘My little children, don’t believe these who go about with deep cloaks and shout and cry along the streets and in the midst of their idols: they think I will listen to them, because of their cries. But I go far away from them, for they are not in the way of truth and righteousness.10

The Church of God In contrast, the worship in Cathar churches was starkly simple. The sacred was not made material, whether in constructing churches, chapels or altars; chanting; or using sacred objects such as the cross, the dove, statues, images, bells or liturgical vessels. (The Church of God) is not built with stones, or wood, or anything made by human hands. For it is written in the Acts of the Apostles (Act 7, 48): ‘The Highest does not dwell in anything made by human hands.’ On the contrary, this holy Church is the congregation of the faithful and the holy, in which Jesus Christ stands and will stand until the end of time . . .11

Guilhem Bélibaste added that the ‘human heart is the true Church of God’. Cathar ceremonies took place in simple houses, either common houses of the Cathar church or homes of the believers; when the persecutions began, they met even in huts, barns, cellars or lofts. There were no sacred objects to represent the divinity, except for the Gospel book. Cathar rituals, which give us the details of a quite precise liturgy, mention only the use of a table for the book, an aquamanile for hand washing, and a candle. Some modern authors attribute the symbol of the dove, meaning the Holy Spirit, to Catharism, but this

9 Sermon of the same Good Men. Sébélia Peyre’s testimony before Jacques Fournier, in Duvernoy, 1965, Tom. II, 420. 10 Guilhem Bélibaste’s sermon; Pèire Maury’s testimony, in ibid. Tom. III, 234. 11 Cathar occitan ritual of Dublin, in: Nelli, 1995.

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interpretation has not been well established anywhere. Furthermore, the cross, symbol of the Passion and the Christian sign above all else, was vigorously rejected as an instrument of violence and death. If your father had been hanged on a tree, would you love that tree? In the same way, since the son of God was nailed to the cross, we must not love the cross but hate it, and if possible break it.12

In fact, the reasons why the Cathars fundamentally rejected images and symbols of the sacred were deeper than simple rationalism and literal interpretation of Scripture; they were grounded on their particular Christian theology, docetist and dualist, which contrasted sharply with the theology of the cross and the Incarnation held by the Roman church (Kienzle, 2001). Medieval heretics indeed believed that human souls were angels, who had fallen from the Kingdom of God and then been made captives ‘by the evil creator (Lucifer, Satan, or the evil principle) in ‘tunics of skin’ or ‘prisons of esh’, made of ‘the mud of forgetfulness’; consequently, they interpreted Christ’s mission of salvation in an entirely spiritual way. The Son of God was sent by his Father down to earth in order to awake sleeping souls by his Gospel, to call them back to their heavenly country and to bring them the means of Salvation by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but not to suffer and die on a cross. Christ was not meant to wear a ‘tunic of skin’ made by the Devil. This would have been completely inconceivable. Consequently, as they were docetist, the Cathars rejected the Incarnation; in Christ, ‘who was adumbrated in the Virgin Mary’, they recognized only the fullness of his divine nature. In Mary herself, they saw not a woman of esh and blood, but an angel of God, who came to accompany Christ on his earthly mission. Christ, the Virgin Mary and John the evangelist came down from Heaven, and they did not have esh like ours. Christ brought them to bear witness.13

In this way, one understands better why the Cathars neither painted nor carved Christ in that human body which, in their view, he never really wore; when Guilhem Bélibaste crudely mocked the common

12 Guilhem Bélibaste’s sermon. Arnaut Sicre’s testimony before Jacques Fournier, in Duvernoy, 1965, Tom. II, 55. 13 Pèiree Garsias, de Toulouse, before inquisitor Bernard de Caux, 1247. Quoted by J. Duvernoy, 1977, 88.

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statues of ‘this Mariette’, he did not scorn her; on the contrary, his view of the Virgin Mary was highly spiritual. The Good Man Pèire Autier preached as well that the Virgin Mary, who was ‘shining in the darkness’,14 symbolized the Church of Christ, persecuted in this world. The Good Men so strongly rejected the cross, not because they thought that Christ truly underwent suffering and death on it (since they regarded the Passion as merely an appearance), but because, from their point of view, it represented an instrument of torture and death, belonging to the Devil’s arsenal. In effect, all these explanations and reasons complement each other: the Cathar theological and religious system constitutes an integral whole whose internal coherence is clearly shown by historical analysis. Docetism is but one aspect of the fundamental dualism of Catharism. This lower world, with its visible and corruptible creatures, does not originate from God. It was created and organized by the Devil, who imprisoned there the angels he seduced. It represents the world of the illusory visible and of the ephemeral corruptible (visibilia et corruptibilia) In his epistle, James says about this present world, which is evil and ‘entirely established in evil (1 Jo 19)’: ‘Adulterous souls, don’t you know that love of this world is enmity with God? . . . (Iac. 4,4) . . . We know that this world is bad, in its age, in its days, in its works, in its people, in its prince, in its priests, in some of its food and drink . . .’15

Eternity and being belong only to the heavenly Father and to his good creation—the Kingdom. This lower world is evil ‘in its works’: it is properly nothingness. Cathar exegesis of the Prologue of St John’s Gospel—‘without Him nothingness was made’—is well known. In fact, the theme of nihil/nothingness can be found everywhere in Cathar preaching: But when the Apostle says: ‘We know that idols are nothingness in the world (1 Cor 8, 8), he explains quite well that everything which is in this world, that is to say belongs to this world, can be called ‘nothingness’ (nihil).’ (Nelli, 1995, 205)

As a matter of fact, the fundamental Christian dualism of Cathar theology excluded all intervention, creative as well as miraculous, by the

14 15

Pèire Autier’s judgement by inquisitor Bernard Gui, in: Limborch, 1696, 91–93. Anonymous Cathar treatise. See Nelli, 1995, 196–197.

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heavenly Father, who ‘neither produced grain nor owers’ in this lower world, whose prince and evil creator is Satan. This is how Guilhem Bélibaste preached: The heavenly Father has nothing of his own in this visible world but the spirits, which the Devil formerly made fall from Paradise . . . And the heavenly Father does not make anything in this world, neither the blooming of owers nor the sprouting of grain, neither conceiving nor giving birth, nor producing an embryo. Overall he does not make anything in this world . . .16

Consequently, we learn that the good Christians not only rejected, on the grounds of the gospel, any sort of idolatry, but also that their theological view left no room for anthropomorphic representations of divinity, neither for depictions celebrating the illusory and diabolical beauty of the visibilia et corruptibilia. In this lower world, nature itself, with its animal and vegetal exuberance, is foreign to God. Is its essence evil or merely material? In the peace of the Kingdom, trees bear no fruit: When God, our Father, will have recovered his entire creation, that is to say all the spirits, grains will sprout, grow, and ower, but never bear kernels; vineyards will have shoots but no grapes; trees will have leaves and owers, but no fruit. . . .17

A Cathar religious art? Does this line of reasoning exclude all possibility for depicting images (human, animal or vegetal) in a hypothetical Cathar iconography? Does it even prohibit the idea of any artistic expression on the part of the Church of the Good Men? In order to answer this question in concrete terms, we fortunately have access to an extant material witness that gives evidence of their religious practice and of their cultural and mental world. Although these heretics, who were faithful to the invisible Kingdom and Christians of the Book, neither built, sang, sculpted, nor made any specic object; they did, however, copy books, in particular Bibles, in a systematic way. Indeed, Good Men (and probably Good Women)

16 Guilhem Bélibaste’s sermon. Arnaut Sicre before Jacques Fournier, in: Duvernoy, 1965, II 58. 17 Ed. Duvernoy, 1965, II, 36.

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did use Bibles every day for preaching and ministry. One of those Bibles escaped the Inquisition to come down to us: Ms PA 36 from the Municipal Library of Lyon. This vellum manuscript, which can be dated to the 13th century, is carefully and beautifully decorated. Studied until now primarily because of its heretical content, this masterpiece deserves a thorough codicologial study. We shall limit ourselves here to a brief study of the iconography of this unique exemplar in order to draw some some answers from it with regard to the perspective of our study.18 This Cathar book is highly unusual in its medieval context, since it is neither a complete Bible (OT and NT), nor a Gospel book, but a complete New Testament; furthermore, this book is written, not in Latin, but in an Occitan translation. It contains the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in that order, followed by the Book of Acts, the Apocalypse, the Catholic epistles, and then the Pauline Epistles, arranged in a non-canonical order. At the end, an Occitan Cathar ritual is copied, which conrms the heretical origin of this book. Containing only the New Testament and the Ritual, this book counts only 243 folios. Measuring 17,5 by 13,2 cm, it seems small in comparison to the corpus of medieval Bibles. Nevertheless, despite its ‘heretical’ content, the book shows most of the principal ‘classical’ characteristics of this type of manuscript: it is copied in a regular script on parchment, in two columns and with rubrics in red ink; initials, alternatively red or blue, mark the beginning of each verse; about thirty large and beautiful illuminated initials, some of them as large as the whole page, decorate the incipit of each gospel and epistle (Fig. 1). It is evident that the persons who commissioned or copied this book wanted to create a beautiful and solemn object. As such, it corresponds perfectly to the description of a Bible that was written ‘in the vernacular’ and used at the beginning of the 14th century by the Good Men Pèire and Jaume Autier. The witness who described it before the inquisitor, was a clerk.

18 There were other Cathar books besides simple Bibles. Many quotations about them are found in Inquisition records. Besides the Bible of Lyon, some fragments of such books have come down to us: three rituals and two treatises. Among them, the Occitan ritual of Lyons is an integral part of Ms PA 36: so we will study it simultaneously; The Liber de duobus Principiis and the Latin ritual of Florence, as well as the Occitan ritual of Dublin, have no other decoration than initials painted in red and blue. The anonymous treaty is a Catholic copy. See Nelli, 1995.

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They showed me a very beautiful book, with the best script of Bologna, wonderfully illuminated with azure and vermilion, which contained the Gospels in the vernacular and, so they said, the Epistles of St Paul . . .19

The Cathar Bible of Lyon in fact constitutes such a classical and carefully made manuscript; it shows a pronounced concern for estheticism but no desire for luxury, since the colours red and blue (azure and vermilion) are the only ones used. There are, however, two points where paleographers and philologists, who have studied its script and linguistic characteristics, can not reach full agreement: the origin of the bible and its date. Specialists locate the provenance of the bible somewhere between the region south of the current departments of Aude and Ariège and the department of Tarn; they assign dates to it that range from 1220 to the second half of the 13th century (Wunderli, 1969; Harris, 1986, 7–14). Until today, its decoration has never been thoroughly examined. What can it teach us about the Cathar scriptorium where this book was produced, and perhaps many others? Let us rst say that the style of decoration of the Lyon Bible, just like its overall features, allows it to be linked to the general context of small 13th century bibles, in particular (but not exclusively) from the South of France. These small Latin bibles, which are very common and, of course, not at all heterodox, contain a type of ligree initial, which appear clearly similar to the ones in our Cathar manuscript. After only brief research, many convincing examples were identied, such as a bible from Aix en Provence (BM, Ms 1554, dated to the third quarter of the 13th century), whose initials resemble, to a great extent, those of the Cathar Bible (Fig. 2). The same type of undulating red and blue decoration, framing ligree designs, is found in many others Latin bibles: for example, a manuscript dated to the 13th century, kept in Avignon but originating from Italy (BM Avignon, Ms 04); several other 13th century bibles from Avignon (BM Avignon, Mss 2, 17 or 78); a manuscript from Arles, dated to the middle of 13th century (BM Arles, ms 2); or a manuscript from Aurillac (BM Aurillac, ms 1), and even bibles from Carpentras, dated to the 14th century (BM de Carpentras, Ms 1 et 2). Among the 13th century bibles, the same style is found in Toulouse (BM Toulouse, mss 1, or 8), and even in Bourges (BM Bourges, ms 2) and as far as Alençon (BM Alençon, ms 55). I have not pushed this research any further; one can

19

Pèire de Luzenac before Geoffroy d’Ablis, in Palès Gobilliard, 1984, 380–381.

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see that this type of decoration was utterly common in the 13th century and up to the beginning of the 14th, and that the Cathar Bible falls quite naturally within the family of manuscripts from that period. The hands that wrote and decorated this Bible, heretical though they were, evidently had the expertise of the scriptoria of their time. Nevertheless, the comparison stops here, because this 13th century Cathar book immediately stands out for its non-gurative decoration, which, to my knowledge, is an isolated case among medieval decorated bibles. Most of the small Latin bibles, containing the same type of ligree initials as the Cathar Bible, also display large historiated initials with gurative illustrations: for example the Bible Ms 1554 of Aix en Provence, or Ms 2 of Carpentras. One nds depictions of biblical scenes, including the prophets, the apostles, and the life of Christ. Even the margins are often decorated with plant motifs, birds, animals, owers, even hunting scenes, musicians, and other secular topics. None of this is found in the Cathar Bible of Lyon. It is worth noting that even the least luxurious of the small Latin bibles, those without large historiated initials, nonetheless always include at the least vegetal motifs in the decoration of the ligree initials. Most of these patterns are owers, intertwined branches, or volutes, completely unknown to the Lyon Bible; at the least gurative vegetal decorations that symbolize spirals of vines or blades of germinating wheat, as in the Bible of Arles and a few others. An exhaustive study has yet to be done, of course, but, to my knowledge, the Cathar Bible, with its strictly geometrical and abstract designs, and no depiction of anything living, does not have any real equivalent among medieval bibles, even though it belongs very broadly to the tradition of the 13th century scriptoria. All the initials, whether the small initials at the beginning of a verse, or the solemn capitals of the incipits, are decorated with strictly geometrical designs. Simple, but often elegant, calligraphy marks the initials, which are successively red and blue. Luxuriant abstract decorations enhance the capitals in a spectacular way. Red initials are underlined with blue, blue initials with red; the capitals interlace red and blue in very ne chiselling, resembling sometimes the art of a goldsmith. But the absence of volutes and spirals and obscure germination, to my knowledge, makes this manuscript constitute an isolated case among 13th century bibles. This evokes the Leit Motiv of Cathar preaching: ‘in this lower world, God produces neither grain nor owers’.

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These pictures demonstrate an unusual skill in line drawing and an impressive sense of aesthetics; they would be worth publishing and studying just for their own sake. The Cathar illuminator’s creativity and dexterity has to be emphasized, since he never repeats himself. Each of the thirty capitals that introduce the books of the New Testament has its own style of ornament: not one of them is similar to another. The series of ‘P’s which opens the epistles of Paul is particularly representative. How would it be possible not to admire the unusual inventiveness of the artist, who seems to be purposely searching for and multiplying all possible types of abstract decoration while at the same time purposely avoiding even the smallest gurative pattern? The result is undeniably strange as well as beautiful and quite original. Conclusion We conclude with two comments in response to two important questions. First, is it possible to consider the Cathar Bible of Lyon in the context of other potentially heterodox bibles of the Middle Ages? In fact, besides this Cathar New Testament, some other examples of Occitan New Testaments with a heterodox origin have come down to us. They are less ancient than the Cathar one, since they are dated to the end of the Middle Ages. I am referring to the corpus of the Waldensian Bibles.20 Among these ve Waldensian Bibles, two, which are kept in Cambridge and Grenoble, can be dated to the 15th century; two others, kept in Dublin and Zürich, are more recent (16th century). The oldest one, the Waldensian Bible of Carpentras (BM Carpentras, ms 8) is datable to the 14th century. Therefore, it will be of great interest to compare it with the Cathar Bible of Lyon, which is dated to the end of the 13th century. These are two versions of the New Testament in the Occitan language, dated about fty years from one another, both originating from Christian dissidents. As a matter of fact, this Waldensian Bible of Carpentras, which was carefully copied on vellum in the 14th century, has a rather typical gurative decoration, similar to the small Catholic bibles. The great initials are decorated classically with vegetal volutes, even with birds

20

On Occitan manuscripts of the medieval Waldensians, see Brenon, 1994.

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and animals. In the lower margin of some of its pages, we can even nd anthropomorphic illustrations (Fig. 3). This is not surprising in any way. While the Waldensians, heretical brothers of the Cathars, rejected the cult of saints and their images, they recognized the creative work of God in this world. In principle, there was nothing that prevented them from representing it. Therefore, there is no more heretical identity to be found between Cathar and Waldensian bibles than between Cathar and Waldensian sermons. This fact conrms, once more, that Cathars apparently were the only medieval Christians who refused all gurative representation of material creation. My second comment may seem to contradict this last assertion, since it reveals two noteworthy exceptions to the strictly abstract nature of iconography in the Bible of Lyon. Two kinds of gurative representations are to be found in the manuscript, either as decoration of a large capital, or as a marginal mark. 1. A graphic mark, placed in the margin and recognizable as a lily, is sometimes used as a sign or a reference (Fig. 4). This type of lily does not belong to heraldic art, but to common graphic use of medieval scribes. Why did the Cathar copyist use it, in spite of his apparent esteem for non-gurative art? At present, I do not see any other way to answer this question but to look at the signicance of the lily in Christian tradition, where it symbolizes pure and virginal love, as in the lily held by the archangel Gabriel at the moment of the Annunciation. We have to acknowledge that this symbolic image gets an even stronger signicance in a Cathar context, where it might evoke the ‘invisible and incorruptible’ creation of the Kingdom, opposing the ‘generation of corruption’ of this lower world. Besides, the Good Men might have interpreted the lily in the same way as the gospel passages: ‘Look at the lily of the elds, how it grows so easily . . .’ (Mt 6,28 and Luke 12,27) making the lily the prototype of an asexual generation. This, of course is merely a hypothesis. 2. In the Cathar Bible, we can nd an animal representation, which is used more systematically, and it is the sh. Like the lily, it is sometimes merely used by the Cathar scribe as a marginal mark, in order to draw attention to a word or a paragraph, especially in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (Fig. 5). In two instances, however, we nd the image of the sh used purposively as a decorative element in the composition of two large capitals: rst in the initial M in the incipit of the Epistle to the Hebrews, then

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in the initial N in the incipit of the Cathar ritual. The sh makes the central pattern of their decoration (Fig. 6). This gurative representation of the sh is a noteworthy exception in the abstract imagery of the Cathar Bible. Even less than the lily, it is not probable that it was put there by chance. More surely than being a mere decorative image, the sh is in this case probably the wellknown early Christian symbol of Christ, here used in a deliberate and intentional way. This element is to be taken in consideration, since it can give us precious indications about the probably ancient Christian tradition taught by the Cathar preachers of the Middle Ages. It would be quite interesting to do further research in this matter. Let us nally highlight the fact that the sh is mentioned in the Gospels as the food which was multiplied by Christ, together with bread, to nourish the people. Therefore, the ascetic Good Men regarded sh as the only nourishment of esh among the corruptibilia that they could allow themselves; furthermore, the sh was reputed to reproduce in water, without copulation. This was another reason for the Good Men to accept its consumption and for us to compare its symbolic use to that of the lily. Even though attempting a generalisation from one single element requires caution (the other Cathar book fragments which have been found scarcely show any decoration), we can assert that this isolated testimony of Cathar art appears to fully conrm the strict and original metaphysical positions taken by the great medieval heresy: as Christians of the Invisible, Cathars seemed not to have wanted any representations at all of the lower world, whose prince is Satan and whose church is Rome. They seemed particularly careful to avoid any gurative image which could evoke the reproduction of material life (this world ‘evil in its works and foundation’, as quoted from the Cathar anonymous treatise). On the contrary, the lily and the sh, which are the only two symbols used in the Cathar Bible of Lyon, evoke immaculate generation and birth, like a reection of the invisible world, where ‘vineyards will have shoots but no grapes’. They also give evidence of some early Christian traditions. All of that powerfully evokes the opposition between the lower world and the Kingdom of heaven, between the visibilia et corruptibilia and the celestial creatures, whose reections can not be imprisoned in order to illuminate the pages of the Holy Scripture, other than in the beauty of abstract motifs—or in the symbols of the sh and the lily. If the Cathar copyist and painter searched for and found abstract iconographical solutions unparalleled in the corpus of medieval

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illuminations, his work and expertise nonetheless belonged without question to the cultural and technical traditions of the scriptoria of his day: he was a true and skilful professional with a capacity for innovation (Fig. 7). When one considers the systematic use that Cathar churches and communities made of this kind of Bible and ritual, one can only raise questions about the existence of workshops of clerical translators, copyists, and painters, which may have been established near important religious establishments, such as bishops’ houses. The quality of their biblical exegesis and of their religious reection revealed the high theological level of heretical preachers (Riparelli, 2005, 323–348). The examination—albeit brief—of the only beautiful Cathar manuscript which has escaped the destruction of persecution, conrms that the Good Men were also good medieval clerics, who, in addition, had kept an undeniable early Christian inheritance alive. LITERATURE Primary literature Ms Lyon, BM, PA 36 Cathar occitan ritual of Dublin, in: René Nelli, Ecritures cathares. Paris, le Rocher, 1995. Nouvelle édition actualisée et augmentée par Anne Brenon. Epistola CDLXXII, Evervini Steinfeldensis praepositi ad s. Bernardum, in P.L. 182, col. 676–680. Historia Inquisitionis, Ed. Phil. a Limborch. Tom II. Amsterdam, 1696, 91–93. L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis et les cathares du comté de Foix, 1308–1309. Ed. A. Palès Gobilliard. Paris: CNRS éditions, 1984, 339–340. Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, éd. Jean Duvernoy, 3 vol. Toulouse, Privat, 1965, Tom. II. Secondary literature Aurell, M., (ed.), Les cathares devant l’Histoire. Mélanges offerts à Jean Duvernoy, Cahors; L’Hydre éditions, 2005. Borst, A., Die Katharer, Stuttgart 1953 (Schriften der M.G.H. 12). Brenon, A., ‘Le choix hérétique. Lecture de quatre sentences de l’Inquisition toulousaine, 1309–1313’, in Le choix hérétique, Cahors, La Louve, 2006. ———, ‘The Waldensian Books’, in Biller, P., Hudson, A., (ed), Heresy and Literacy 1000–1630, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———, Les Archipels Cathares, Paris, 2001. Duvernoy, J., La religion des cathares, Privat, 1977. Kienzle, B.M., ‘Inimici crucis: la théologie de la croix et la persécution du catharisme’, in E. Le Roy Ladurie (ed.), Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan, L’Hydre éditions, 2001, 279–300 [actes du colloque de Montaillou, 2000]. Moore, J., The Birth of Popular Heresy, Toronto, 1995. Moore, R., The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Power and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250, 1987.

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Müller, D., Albigenser, die wahre Kirche? Eine Untersüchung zum Kirchenverständnis der Ecclesia Dei. Würzburg: A. Lehman, 1986. Nelli, R., Ecritures Cathares. Paris, 1995. Prat, D.I., Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam. 1000–1150. Paris, Aubier, 1998. Riparelli E., ‘Les techniques d’éxégèse des cathares’, in Aurell, M., (ed.), Les cathares devant l’Histoire. Mélanges offerts à Jean Duvernoy, Cahors; L’Hydre éditions, 2005, 323–348. Vaillant, A., Puech, H.C., Le traité contre les bogomiles de Cosmas le prêtre. Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1945. Wunderli, P., Die okzitanischen Bibelübersetzungen des Mittelalters, Frankfurt, 1969 (Analecta Romanica) Harris, M.R., ‘Prolégomènes à l’histoire textuelle du rituel cathare occitan’, in Heresis, 1986, 7–14. Zerner, M. (ed.), L’histoire du catharisme en discussion. Le ‘concile’ de Saint-Félix (1167), Nice, 2001, Collection du CEM de Nice. ———, (ed.), Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’Inquisition. Nice, 1998, Collection du centre d’Etudes médiévales de Nice.

14. THE CLASH BETWEEN CATHOLICS AND CATHARS OVER VENERATION OF THE CROSS Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Harvard Divinity School) Introduction The cross lies at the core of Christian thought on the nature of Christ, redemption and atonement, sacrice and pilgrimage, and the role of images. Disagreement over theology and practices related to the cross divided Christians throughout the Middle Ages. A wide array of practices involved the cross, from liturgical veneration and processions to meditations and visions, from gestures of signing to wearing crosses for protection, healing, and punishment. Moreover, those who did not conform to the theology and practices of the cross were called its enemies. Persons convicted of heresy were sentenced to wear yellow crosses of a specic size on the chest and on the back between the shoulders.1 A ceremony in the thirteenth-century Coventry pontical conferred the cross on someone ‘about to go to the Holy land or another land to ght against the enemies of the cross’ (Brundage, 1966, 289–310 at pp. 294–95, 307; cf. Pennington, 1974, 429–35). The expression inimici crucis, derived from Philippians 3, 18–19 (‘For many . . . live as enemies of the cross of Christ.’), appears often in patristic literature to denounce sinners, but it also targets Arians and Pelagians.2 For medieval authors, the phrase designated sinners broadly and labelled heretics, Jews, and Muslims. The crusades set forth to pursue the enemies of the cross in the Holy Land and various areas of Europe. Dissident Christians, however, objected to the theology

1 Le livre des sentences de l’inquisiteur Bernard Gui: 1308–1323; ed. and trans. Annette Pales-Gobilliard (Paris: CNRS, 2002), 2 vols. See examples on 178–79, 206–07, 210–11, 224–25, 340–41, 360–61, 566–67, 568–69, 626–27, 836–37, 870–71, 874–75, 974–75, 976–77, 994–995, 1254–55, 1290–91, 1438–41, 1470–71. 2 Victorinus, Commentarii in epistulas Pauli, In epistulam ad Philippenses, PL 8, 1224–25, atacks Arians who accept neither the cross nor the humanity of Christ. Augustine, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum, IV.4 CSEL (Vienna, 1913), 524.

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of the cross, the everyday practices involving it, and the development of crusading ideology. The present study explores views on the cross from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. The sources selected relate to preaching, the major vehicle for catholics and dissidents to convey their beliefs. From the turn of the thirteenth century, we look briey at the sermons of Alexander of Ashby to gain insight into liturgical preaching on the cross. We then examine texts from clearly polemical contexts: an anonymous Cistercian sermon against heresy, the vita of Marie d’Oignies, and a set of model sermons by Humbert of Romans. Lastly, inquisitorial documents will be used to reconstruct the preaching and beliefs of the Cathars in the early fourteenth century. Alexander of Ashby Before examining texts on the cross in crusade contexts, it is useful to view briey liturgical preaching on the cross. The two feasts of the Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, and the Invention of the Cross, May 3, generated numerous sermons, liturgical texts, and legendary narratives. In addition, Good Friday with the ritual veneration of the cross, and Palm Sunday, with its remembrance of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, occasioned preaching on the cross, as did other feasts, such as St. Andrew’s day, for which Bernard of Clairvaux expounded the theology of the cross (Leclercq, 1963, 119–132). Prior to the rite for taking the cross, according to evidence from the Lambrecht pontical, a mass of the Holy Cross was celebrated (Pennington, 1974, 429–435). The feast of Holy Cross at times became a crusade recruitment day and preachers used sermons on the cross for more than one purpose (Tyerman, 1998, 73–74). A full examination of these materials would require a very lengthy study. Nonetheless, a thematic outline can be gleaned from a sample: the model sermons of Alexander of Ashby, written at the turn of the thirteenth century before the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Alexander, prior of the Augustinian house of Ashby, composed an ars praedicandi with two collections of sermons intended for the training of preachers who would address the laity.3 Each of the two collections contains 3 Alexandri Essebiensis Opera omnia: 1. Opera theologica: De articioso modo predicandi, Sermones, ed. Franco Morenzoni, CC CM 188 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), xiii.

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a model for preaching the cross, without designation of the liturgical occasion. The rst sermon, based on Galatians 6, 14, urges the imitation of Christ through the practice of virtues and good works, a standard theme in such texts.4 The preacher denounces the proud and hard-hearted enemies of Christ, and his nal exhortation invites the audience to approach and venerate the cross in order to step near to Christ with virtues and good works.5 Alexander’s second sermon, on John 12, 32, elaborates a threefold benet of the cross: redemption through the Passion; strengthening through faith; protection through signing. The rst two benets relate to the themes of the rst sermon, and Alexander adduces Galatians 6, 14 in this text as well. The third benet concerns the belief that the sign of the cross chases away evil spirits.6 Taken together, the two sermons outline the principal themes of preaching the cross: redemption, conversion, progress in faith, protection; and they recommend imitation of Christ through the exercise of virtue and good works. As we shall see, those themes are developed in crusade preaching, which urges imitation through pilgrimage and martyrdom. This is in contrast to earlier preaching on the cross, which emphasizes both the theme of redemption and Christ’s triumph over death in the resurrection (Leclercq, 1963, 120–32). Alexander underscores redemption but does not speak of resurrection. Finally, the rst of the two sermons denounces enemies of the cross but does not assign them a specic identity. Nonetheless, the accusations of pride and hardness of heart match those of preaching against Jews as well as heretics (Chazan, 1997, 41–52, 60–61, 88–89, et alibi).

4 Bernardus Claraevallensis, Sermones in die Paschae, 1, Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq et H. Rochais, (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1966), vol. 5, 90: ‘Aliud tempus elegit confortandis discipulis et adversariis confutandis. Interim patientiam magis exhibet, humilitatem commendat, oboedientiam implet, percit caritatem. His nempe virtutum gemmis quattuor cornua crucis ornantur, et est supereminentior caritas, a dextris oboedientia, patientia a sinistris, radix virtutum humilitas in profundo.’ 5 Alexandri Essebiensis Sermones, I, VII, 152–55. This echoes a theme of Augustine’s preaching on the breadth, length, height, and depth of the cross and its moral signicance. See Paul van Geest’s ne discussion of Sermon 53 in Van Geest, 2007, 186–188. 6 Alexandri Essebiensis Sermones, II, XVI, 250–51.

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The next text we consider also dates from the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century. For more than eighty years, Cistercians preached against heresy in Occitania (1145–1229), but only one sermon is extant from this period (Kienzle, 2001, 283–99). Translated into Latin by Alan of Lille, the sermon was preached in the vernacular by an unnamed Cistercian abbot at the parish church of St. Firmin at Montpellier.7 The abbot draws on Philippians 3, 18–19 as he interprets the notion of foreign gods in Genesis 35, 2–3 (‘Put away the foreign gods that are among you, purify yourselves, and change your garments’) as hostility against the cross. The preacher addresses two questions: what is enmity to the cross, and who are the enemies of the cross? He elaborates a threefold hostility to the cross: refutation of Christ’s incarnation, denial of his passion, and scorn for his crucixion. The abbot exhorts his audience to glory in the cross rather than to reject it (Gal 6, 14),8 and he calls them to reject enmity to the cross and to the veneration of Christ’s passion.9 The abbot urges his listeners to contemplate the crucied Christ with his head resting on the cross because he had no other place to lay it, as the Gospel states: ‘The Son of man has 10 nowhere to lay his head (Mt 8, 20; Lk 9, 58). For this preacher, those

7 Paris, BnF ms lat 14859, fol. 233–234; Bibl. Mun. Dijon ms 219, fol. 74v o–76: Sermo quem composuit abbas cisterciensis romanis verbis aput Montepessulanum in ecclesia beati Firmini quem postea magister Alanus transtulit in latinam. M.-Th. d’Alverny, 1965, 13–15. The Dijon ms. dates from 1214; the Paris ms. from the early thirteenth century. See B. Hauréau, 1886, 1–27. I am grateful to Martha Newman for lending me her notes and photos of the Paris ms.; to the Bibliothèque Municipale of Dijon for sending me photocopies of the sermon and allowing me to examine it in situ; to Anne Brenon for assistance in procuring the photocopies. 8 Peter the Venerable also develops this theme. See Iogna-Prat, 1998, 188–89; Petrus Venerabilis, Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, ed. J. Fearns, (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 118, 70. Aelred of Rievaulx treats the same theme, alluding to the antiphon ‘In exaltatione sanctae crucis’ (Hesbert 3, 3954). Aelred compares the Cistercian order to the cross as image of Christian and especially monastic life: ‘Iam ipsa crux Christi sit quasi speculum Christiani . . . Ordo noster crux Christi est’. Aelredi Rievallensis Sermones I–XLVI, ed. G. Raciti, Turnhout, 1989, 87–88. See footnote 19 on the sermon for the anti-Jewish context of the sermon. 9 The preceding exegetical tradition associated foreign gods with worldliness in general, but some commentators linked them to heresy. See Kienzle, 2001a, 290–291, n. 524. 10 BnF ms lat 14859, fol. 233v o; Bibl. mun. Dijon ms 219, fol. 75v o: ‘Inimicitia crucis est incarnationi Christi contradicere, passionem eius negare, crucem eius contempnere. Inimici ergo crucis sunt heretici qui Christi cruci obviant, passionem negant. Simus ergo amici crucis cum apostolo dicentes: ‘Absit mihi gloriari nisi in cruce Dominis Iesu

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who deny Christ’s passion refuse to offer him a place to lay his head and even refuse to lift up his head to keep it from hanging down on the cross. Rejection of belief in the Passion demonstrates a hostile lack of compassion as well as indelity and wickedness.11 The preacher then calls on the audience to contemplate the rest of Christ’s body: the hands extended in welcome and the arms in embrace, the hands and feet pierced by nails, the wounded side. The abbot was probably pointing to a crucix during this part of the sermon, directing the listeners’ mental and visual attention toward the physical object.12 The Cistercian invites the audience to build nests in the open wounds of Christ’s body by doing good works and practicing virtues in faith, humility and charity. Through these holes in the Lord’s esh, one enters the kingdom of heaven.13 In the Cistercian’s denunciation of enmity to the cross, one recognizes the beliefs of the Cathars, for whom Christ was not completely human and did not undergo a true death in the esh.14 Such a sacrice would not even have been possible in their view, for in as much as he was the Son of God, he was not subject to the power of the evil principle,

Christi’ (Gal. 6, 14). Abiciamus ergo deos alienos, id est crucis inimicitias, et accedamus ad Christem per dem, Christi venerantes passionem, considerantes quomodo caput inclinavit in cruce, nec invenit usquam reclinare. Unde ipse ait: ‘Vulpes foveas habent, et volucres coeli nidos: lius autem hominis non habet ut caput reclinet’ (Mt 8, 20, Lk 9, 58). Quanta indelitas, quanta iniquitas, vix invenitur aliquis qui prebeat capiti Christi reclinatorium! Qui sustinentes in cruce ut nos reciperet . . . consideremus quomodo pedes Christi clavis ferreis fuerunt perforati. Consideremus quomodo perforatus fuit latus Christi’. Earlier exegesis of this passage generally points to sinfulness in general, not specically heresy, as the condition explaining the Son of man’s forsakenness. 11 The abbot exclaims: BnF ms lat 14859, fol. 233v o; Bibl. mun. Dijon ms 219, fol. 75v o: ‘Quanta indelitas, quanta iniquitas, vix invenitur aliquis qui prebeat capiti Christi reclinatorium!’. 12 BnF ms lat 14859, fol. 233v o; Bibl. mun. Dijon ms 219, fol. 75v o–76: ‘Hec foramina facta sunt ut nos in regnum per dem intremus, per humilitatem ingrediamur, per caritatem introducamur. Hec sunt foramina de quibus dicitur in Psalmo: Foderunt ‘manus meas et pedes meos’; et in Cantico amoris: ‘in foraminibus petre’ et ‘in cavernis macerie’. In his foraminibus debemus inclinare per dem, nidos facere per bonam operationem’. On preachers, gestures, and the use of objects, see Kienzle, 2001b, 105–109. 13 This notion seems not far from the allegory of Charity wounding Christ in Hugh of St Victor’s De laude charitatis and Richard of St. Victor’s De quattuor gradibus violentiae caritatis, and its later form of the virtues crucifying Christ. On those texts, see Newman, 2003, 160–65. 14 Patristic commentators were not altogether comfortable with Jesus’ humanity either. Madigan, 1995, 157–173, points out the problems of interpretation of patristic texts among scholastic commentators. See also Madigan, 1998, 213–229.

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the prince of death.15 Exegetical tradition links two of the sermon’s key biblical texts: Song of Songs 2, 14 (‘O my dove, in the clefts of 16 the rock, in the covert of the cliff ’) and Psalm 21, 17 (22, 16) (‘they have pierced my hands and feet’) very closely with the Passion, and exegesis of the Psalm reveals both anti-Jewish sentiments and denunciations of heresy.17 The sermon, therefore, demonstrates how this intellectual tradition of exegesis and treatise-writing was disseminated to the wider public. Scholars have pointed to an increasing emphasis on Christ’s suffering in the late twelfth century. Jean Leclercq located a turning point in devotion to the Passion not in Bernard of Clairvaux’s works but at the end of the twelfth century (Leclercq, 1963, 132). Robert Chazan has demonstrated the correlation between the emphasis on Jesus’ humanity and a growing resentment of Jews.18 The Cistercian sermon indicates that a similar correlation must have existed to the detriment of other 19 so-called enemies of the cross. 15 See Brenon, 1995, 66, on Cathar beliefs and the varying degrees of docetism. See also B. Hamilton, 1999, 11–12. On the Cathars, the Bogomils and the cross, see Lambert, 1998, 29–30; and on Hugh Eteriano’s critique of the Patarenes’ rejection of the cross, see Hamilton, 2005, 20–21. 16 Gregory the Great links the ‘clefts of the rock’ to Christ’s passion and subsequent commentators follow suit. Twelfth-century Cistercians (Bernard, Guerric of Igny, Isaac of Stella) bring this interpretation into sermons, as does Innocent III, and Alan of Lille includes it in his collection of distinctiones. Guerric of Igny expresses a theme very close to that of our unidentied Cistercian abbot and adduces the same Psalm text. See Kienzle, 2001a, and sources cited, 292, n. 528 17 Peter the Venerable, Peter of Blois, and Alain of Lille interpret Ps 21,17 (22, 16) to inculpate the Jews, while Peter Abelard, Eckbert of Schönau, and the converted heretics Bonacursus of Milan and Ermengaud of Béziers use it against heresy. See Kienzle, 2001a, and sources cited, 29–93, n. 529. 18 See R. Chazan, 1997, 88–89, on the humanization of Christ and the blame cast upon the Jews for his death, and pp. 60–61, on mid twelfth-century accusations of the abuse of Christian symbols by Jews. 19 Several contemporary examples illustrate the range of the term’s usage. Aelred of Rievaulx uses the expression inimici crucis in a general way in Sermo X, cited above, note 16, but he denounces the Jews (illi Iudaei lutei et terreni), just before that in the same sermon, alluding to Isaiah 9, 10(9): ‘Adoratur Christus, laudatus, clamatur, quia, illis luteis lateribus tacentibus, vivi lapides clamant’. Sermones, 85–86. Bernard de Clairvaux calls Arnaud de Brescia and Peter Abelard enemies of the cross: Epistulae 195, 331, Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq et H. Rochais, vol. 8, Rome, 1977. He exhorts the Knights Templar to attack the enemies of the cross: Liber ad milites Templi de laude novae militiae, Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq et H. Rochais, vol. 3, Rome, 1963, 214. Henry of Clairvaux/Albano, De peregrinante civitate Dei, PL 204, 360, compares crusaders, friends of the cross, with the enemies of the cross. Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay refers to the twenty-four knights who defended the castrum of Lavaur with Aimery de Montréal as enemies of the cross. Hystoria Albigensis, éd. P. Guébin et E. Lyon, Paris,

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Vita of Marie of Oignies Churchmen who disseminated the reform-based anti-heretical message of the Fourth Lateran Council employed other literary genres in addition to preaching. Jacques of Vitry dedicated his vita of Marie d’Oignies to Fulk, bishop of Toulouse, who was living in exile in northern France while his city was occupied by Cathar supporters. Marie stands not merely as a model for female sanctity but as a counter-model to the Cathar women in Fulk’s region. An avid consumer and wise critic of sermons, Marie also devoted herself to venerating the cross. Jacques points out that the beginning of Marie’s conversion resided in the cross and Passion. The cross, which he compares to a winepress, presses out Marie’s tears, so copious they muddied the dirt oor of the church where she worshipped. Marie fell into ecstasy whenever she gazed at the image of the cross or heard people talking about the Passion.20 Marie renounced her own will and chastised her body through humble imitation of Christ. For three years, the holy woman chose the Feast of the Holy Cross to begin a fasting regime of bread and water that lasted approximately six months until Easter.21 After describing Marie’s ascetic practices, Jacques moves to an account of the gifts of the Holy Spirit at work in the holy woman. As proof of the spirit of piety, Marie calls upon the death and blood of the Crucied in order to dispel a crowd of howling demons that besieged a sister on her deathbed.22 The cross proved as effective for eliminating

1926, 215, tom. I, 214. Around the time that Alan of Lille translated the sermon cited here, the statutes of the General Chapter of Cîteaux from 1189 and 1190 refer to Jews as inimici crucis. Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, I (1116–1220), éd. J. Canivez, Louvain, 1933, 113: 1189.15, 121, 1190.14. See also Alain de Lille, De de catholica contra hereticos, PL 210, IV, 11, 427–428 on the defense of images against the opinion of Jews and Saracens. 20 Attempts to restrain the ow of tears only intensied their stream, as sorrow was renewed in her soul. A priest who rebuked the holy woman had his spirit inundated with tears that nearly suffocated him and drenched the altar book and linens. Marie herself saturated one head veil after another to keep from muddying the oor, but she suffered no headaches or ill effects from her weeping. The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. with intro. and notes, Margot H. King, (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Co., 1989), 31–32 (c. 16); 32–33 (c. 17). 21 The cross moved Marie’s conversion not only of heart but also of life. Following Christ’s teaching in Luke 9, 23 (Who wishes to come after me, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me). Life of Marie d’Oignies, 36 (c. 21); 38 (c. 24). 22 Marie envisions another demonic horde chased from a dying woman, in this case by a banner of the crucix held by an angel (‘ethereal key-bearer’). Life of Marie d’Oignies, 66–68, (c. 50–52).

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sexual desire as it did for chasing demons. Praising the spirit of fortitude in the holy woman, Jacques writes that Marie stretched her body between two crosses in order to dry out any sensation of lust.23 Finally, the cross appears in the vita as the emblem of the crusade against heresy. A full three years before local men took the cross against heretics, Marie experienced a vision of crosses descending from heaven over a host of men, a common motif in crusade chronicles.24 Jacques describes those who died ghting heresy in Occitania as holy martyrs who fought out of love of the crucix, while he describes their opponents as ‘enemies of the cross of Christ.’ In a vision, Marie saw angels rejoicing over their deaths and transporting them directly to heaven. She became so ardent about the pilgrimage that she wanted to undertake it herself, but she refrained because she would have provoked scandal.25 Thus, in a text written by a preacher to provide a counter-model to dissident women, the cross centers the theology of conversion and of holiness lived within gendered bounds of piety. On an individual level, that of Marie’s life, the cross motivates ascetic practices, chases demons, safeguards against lust, and protects the holy woman from disparagement. The cross also links her personal devotion with the crusade, as her visions conrm the rightness of battle against heresy and the theology of pilgrimage and martyrdom that underpinned the crusades. Model sermons of the thirteenth century: Humbert of Romans The Fourth Lateran Council spurred the recruitment and instruction of preachers, notably in the mendicant orders, and the composition of model sermons to direct preaching for various venues and purposes. A collection of crusade sermons edited by Christoph Maier provides valuable examples of this type of preaching, which was inspired by reform ideas shaped in Paris (Maier, 2000; Tyerman, 1998, 62–74). Jacques de Vitry composed lengthy model sermons that include numerous biblical references and exempla that a preacher could use to preach the cross.

23

Life of Marie d’Oignies, 88 (c. 75). See Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, Hystoria Albigensis, éd. P. Guébin et E. Lyon (Paris, 1926), 151–152; Tyerman, 1998, 62–74; Kienzle, 2001a, 298–99; Bird, 2001, 86–119; 120–182. 25 Life of Marie d’Oignies, 95–96 (c. 82). 24

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In one crusade sermon, he denounces the ‘enemies of the cross’ who ‘extend sacrilegious hands’ to destroy Jerusalem.26 In contrast to Jacques’s lengthy discourses, Humbert of Romans (c. 1200–1277) composed a model sermon collection that includes concise model sermons for preaching the cross in various settings. Minister general of the Dominican order, Humbert also authored an ars praedicandi and a treatise on preaching the cross (De predicacione crucis, 1266/68). The fourth, very brief sermon in the set edited by Maier, makes a cross reference to the latter work.27 The other three sermons illustrate the themes of pilgrimage, sacrice, and indulgence. By this period, soldiers on crusade were called crucesignati as well as pilgrims, and the rites for taking the cross were added to earlier ceremonies for conferring the pilgrim’s symbols of staff and scrip (Brundage, 1966, 294–95, Pennington, 1974, 429–35). Sermon One distinguishes three types of pilgrimage: the general, the particular, and a third, which Humbert terms the pilgrimage of outstanding excellence surpassing all others: the crusade to the Holy Land. By wearing the cross, crusaders follow the example of Christ who carried his own cross.28 Sermon Two, a recruitment exhortation, aims to serve for preaching the cross in any situation. Humbert explains that the crusader’s cross indicates three things: its wearers ght for the faith of the crucied Christ; as his soldiers they bear his sign; and the indulgence they are granted derives from the treasure of Christ’s Passion that he lled on the cross.29 Humbert’s Sermon Three targets heresy, by far the worst of sins in his view. He employs standard polemical charges that heresy involves obstinacy, proves infectious like leprosy, and deceptive like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.30 Moreover, heresy aims to destroy the entire church, to create new roads to hell, and to turn people away from the righteous course to heaven. Preaching, debate, discussion, even excommunication, all prove ineffective to root out heresy. The obduracy of heresy justies more severe measures: removal from ofce, conscation of property,

26

James of Vitry, Sermon I.15, in Crusade Propaganda, 92. Humbert of Romans, Sermon IV, in Crusade Propaganda, 228–229. 28 Humbert of Romans, Sermon I, in Crusade Propaganda, 210–215, at 212. 29 Humbert of Romans, Sermon II, in Crusade Propaganda, 216–221. 30 See Kienzle, 2001c, esp. 16–20, 104–105, 119–26, 203–209 on rhetoric of polemics against heresy. 27

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imprisonment, and even death at the hands of secular authority. Humbert justies the death of heretics on several grounds and concludes with a call to the imagined audience to join the army of the Crucied and put on the sign of the cross.31 These model sermons by Humbert of Romans expound the theology of the cross in pilgrimage and crusade. However, they comment but little on religious practice. In contrast, the thirteenth-century sermons from Paris studied by Nicole Bériou include numerous references to the powers and practice of signing (Bériou, 1998, 68–69, 248, 263, 369, 388, 402–03, 433, 451). Testimonies about the ‘good men’ Model sermons such as Humbert’s provide little to no indication of what the dissidents thought or did. For that, we turn to inquisitorial documents. Three documents from the rst quarter of the fourteenth century inform us about the circumstances and content of the Cathars’ preaching: the fragmentary Register of Geoffroy d’Ablis, inquisitor of Carcassonne (1308–1309), the Register of Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers and Mirepoix (1318–1325) and the Sentences of Bernard Gui, inquisitor of Toulouse (1307–1323).32 The Registers, with lengthy testimony for witnesses, expectedly provide richer material for this study than the Sentences, which summarize the charges. The fragmentary Register of Geoffroy d’Ablis contains depositions from seventeen people.33 Fifteen of the seventeen concern the preaching and the beliefs of the good men. Taken together they give evidence of informal preaching that took place in homes and was structured around

31

Humbert of Romans, Sermon III, in Crusade Propaganda, pp. 222–227. Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, évêque de Pamiers (1318–1325) (Manuscrit no Vat. Latin 4030 de la Bibliothèque vaticane), publié avec introduction et notes par Jean Duvernoy, (Toulouse: Privat, 1965), 3 vols.; Le registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier (Évêque de Pamiers), 1318–1325, traduit et annoté par Jean Duvernoy; préf. de Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, (Paris; New York: Mouton, 1978), 3 vols.; L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis et les cathares du comté de Foix: (1308–1309), ed. and trans. Annette Pales-Gobilliard, (Paris: CNRS, 1984); Le livre des sentences de l’inquisiteur Bernard Gui: 1308–1323; ed. and trans. Annette Pales-Gobilliard, (Paris: CNRS, 2002), 2 vols. 33 From the lower Ariège valley; they and their families are all linked to the Autier family from Ax-les-Thermes. For the most part, they are literate. See Jean Duvernoy, ‘Geoffroy d’Ablis—Manuscrit latin BN n0 4269’, 2001, http://jean.duvernoy.free. fr, 14. 32

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reading and commentary in small groups.34 Varied methods of questioning about preaching sollicit a remarkable body of testimonies,35 most of which emphasize the apostolic life and the identity of the Cathars as the true church of God. Three depositions concern the heretics’ refusal to venerate the cross. According to Guillelme Garsen, the heretics went as far as saying that making the sign of the cross was making the sign of the devil.36 Blanche of Rodes testied that the cross should be despised because ‘God had been placed on it, crucied, spat upon, and killed.’37 Likewise, according to Pierre of Gaillac, a notary who wrote his own deposition, no one should worship the instrument of Christ’s death and dishonor. Furthermore, the heretics disputed the establishment of the crusade; they found no value in it and asserted that it did nothing for taking away sins. Instead, they asserted that to follow the cross meant to conform to God’s word and to do good works. Pierre of Gaillac recounts an exemplum which illustrates the teaching of the good men.38 If a man had been hanged on a tree, the man’s family would always hate the tree; therefore we should be horried at the cross where God was hanged.39 This exemplum echoes the teaching of the Bogomils, as early as the ninth century letter against them by the priest Cosmas. Inuenced by Eastern iconoclasm, the Bogomil-Cathar movement rejected images and symbols, particularly the cross.40 Cosmas reported the following words: ‘If someone killed the king’s son with a piece of wood, would that wood be precious to the king? The same is true for the cross

34 As in other inquisition registers, the questions structure the replies and often lead to a simple yes or no answer: Interrogatus si audivit predicationes vel monitiones eorum. See examples: A. Pales Gobilliard, L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis, 86–87, 88–89, 90–91, 94–95, 98–99, 104–105, 122–23. The inquisitors refer to sermons (predicationes), admonitions (monitiones), or more generally words (verba). At times open questions lead to longer, more detailed responses. A. Pales-Gobilliard, L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis, 117–118: Raimond Autier: ‘Interrogatus quid facit vel quid dixit cum eis vel quid audivit ab eis . . . Interrogatus quid dicebant . . .’; Raimond Issaurat, pp. 262–63: ‘Interrogatus quid dixerunt sibi dicti heretici’. 35 A. Pales-Gobilliard, L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis, 180–81, Guillelme Garsen: ‘et audivit . . . Interrogatus quid dixit . . .’, 220–21: Blanche de Rodes: ‘dixit interrogata quod audivit a dictis hereticis . . .’. 36 A. Pales-Gobilliard, L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis, 190–91. 37 A. Pales-Gobilliard, L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis, 228–29. 38 On exempla, see C. Brémond, J. Le Goff, and J.C. Schmitt, L’exemplum, 2nd ed. (Brepols: Turnhout, 1996). 39 A. Pales-Gobilliard, L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis, 336–37. 40 On the symbolism of the cross in Byzantine theology see Bornert, 1963, 106–108.

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in God’s eyes’ (Duvernoy, 1976, 22, 228–29, 326, 352–53). Heresies reported around the year 1000 also evidenced rejection of the cross, and ironically, Peter of Bruys died on a pyre of crosses that he had erected in protest against the veneration of the cross.41 The same exemplum that Pierre of Gaillac told in mockery of the veneration of the cross appears in the testimony of other witnesses before the fourteenth-century inquisitors. The Sentences of Bernard Gui record that Pierre Raimond Domergue of Born confessed in August 1321 that he had heard Pierre Autier and Amiel of Perles preaching that ‘the cross of Christ should not be worshipped and that no one would worship the gallows on which his father had been hanged.’42 Among the many statements in the Sentences that concern preaching against the doctrine and sacraments of the Church, several report that the heretics asserted, ‘no one should worship the cross’; one summary adds to the cross ‘images of wood and stone and idols.’43 The Register of Jacques Fournier provides fascinating testimonies that relate to the veneration of the cross. One demonstrates that the practice of signing oneself was a touchstone for orthodoxy. Barthélemy Aurillac, a priest from the diocese of Urgel, testied against Bernard Clergue of Montaillou. He reports on behavior he observed while the two were in prison, sharing the same cell. According to the priest, Bernard ‘did not make the sign of the cross until he was reprimanded about it,’ and then he crossed himself occasionally before going to bed, but did not make the sign of the cross over his food. Bernard also reportedly told Barthélemy how the heretics pretended to be catholic when entering 41 Stories of profanation circulated about the Petrobrusians and fueled anger against the dissidents. Peter the Venerable took up the challenge of refuting the heretics and devoted the third proposition of his Contra Petrobrusianos to defending the cross. IognaPrat, 1998, 185–187, 191–192; Peter the Venerable, Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, ed. J. Fearns, (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), op. 122–148. On heresies around the 1000 and the cross, see Moore, 1995, 30, 36, 102–103, 152–153. 42 Le livre des sentences de Bernard Gui, Sermon, 12 September 1322, 1476–1477: ‘quod crux Christi non debebat adorari, quia nullus adoraret furcas in quibus pater suus fuisset suspensus.’ 43 Le livre des sentences de Bernard Gui, Sermo, 23 April 1312: Bernard Macip of Lugan, condemned to the Mur, p. 684–85: ‘nullus debebat adorare crucem’ and that ‘capellani et religiosi serviebant ecclesie dyaboli et adorabant crucem et ymagines de ligno et lapide et ydola.’ Guillaume Monge of Lugan, confessed 13 May 1309, that he heard the good men state (740–41): ‘quod crux non debebat adorari . . .’. Sermo, 20 September 1313, 848–49; Pierre Raimond des Huhous reportedly held the error that ‘signaculum sancte crucis nichil valet, nec eodem signaculo te vis signare, set omnino renuis et recuses.’ Sermon, 7 March 1316, 896–97: Ponce Raynes was accused of hearing Pierre and Jacques Autier preaching ‘contra venerationem crucis.’

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a church by signing themselves on the forehead, chin, and ears while they muttered a formula to substitute for the standard Trinitarian blessing.44 Guillaume Escanier of Ax-les-Thermes confessed that Pierre and Jacques Autier blasphemed the sign of the cross, saying that one should not make it, or show respect to the cross because the Lord was crucied and dishonored on it.45 The rich testimony of Sibille Peyre from Arques includes details on Pierre Autier’s preaching about the cross. Neither the cross nor the crucix should be venerated, he said; nor should statues of saints, because those are idols. Moreover, just as a man would destroy the gallows on which his father was hanged, one should break crosses, because it was on the cross that Christ gave the appearance of being hanged.46 Later Sibille reports that Pierre Autier described crossing oneself upon entering a church as a good method for chasing ies away from one’s face in the summer. Pierre Autier also laughed and suggested the formula mentioned above: ‘Here is the forehead, here is the beard, here is one ear, and here is the other.’47 Pierre Maury, testifying at great length in 1323, conrms the same points: the cross should not be venerated, because the son of God gave the appearance of dying on it; one would not reverence the tree on which his father had been hanged; making the sign of the cross was useful for chasing ies. He adds a story that he had made the sign of the cross over the water in a fountain in the presence of Guillaume Bélibaste, who explained to him that the sign of the cross was not the sign of God.48 In summary, these depositions convey Cathar opposition to adoration of the cross. Docetic theology that the Son of God appeared to die, appears explicitly in the testimony of two witnesses. Several statements relate to rejection and mockery of the act of signing. Moreover, Pierre de Gaillac reports the good men’s opposition to the crusade and the power of indulgences.

44 Le registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier (translation), II, p. 501. Signing that involved the ears was practiced in early Christianity, as attested in Hippolytus of Rome and Cyprian. See Vogel, 1963, 46–49. 45 Le registre, II, 572. 46 Le registre, II, 572 47 Le registre, II, 581. 48 Le registre, II, 1002.

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At the heart of the medieval campaigns against heresy lay irreconcilable views on the cross. For catholic Christians, the cross symbolized above all humanity’s redemption. To be worthy of Christ’s sacrice and make satisfaction for his death, one must venerate the cross, do penance, sacrice oneself in this life, and in the context of the crusade, wear the cross and accept possible martyrdom in a holy war. Crosses, from the simple to the exquisite, marked churches, manuscripts, private dwellings, and public places. For the dissidents, the sacrice of God’s son was inconceivable; he could not be conquered by evil and was not completely human. The cross, an instrument of death, did not deserve veneration. To counter the Cathars and their views on the cross, the crucixion, and the crusade, learned churchmen produced sermons, saints’ lives, treatises, and other literature, only a fraction of which we have had time to consider. Inquisitors imposed the wearing of yellow crosses as one of their least severe punishments. The sources we have examined conrm the observation that from the late twelfth century onward western Christian spirituality focused more and more on the suffering of the crucied Christ. It is difcult to assess how much the opposition to enemies of the cross inuenced that development. However, it is clear that from the point of view of the Cistercian abbot and others, dissidents’ protests against the centrality of the cross constituted the rejection of Christian belief and even a refusal of compassion for Christ. The Cathars, on the other hand, joined the voices of other dissidents in centuries before and after who disputed the veneration of the icon of the cross. LITERATURE Primary literature Aelredi Rievallensis Sermones I–XLVI. ed. G. Raciti. Turnhout, 1989. Alain de Lille, De de catholica contra hereticos, PL 210, IV, 11, 427–428. Alexandri Essebiensis Opera omnia: 1. Opera theologica: De articioso modo predicandi, Sermones. ed. F. Morenzoni, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004 (CC CM 188). Augustine, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum. Vienna, 1913 (CSEL). Bernardus Claraevallensis [Sancti Bernardi] Opera. ed. J. Leclercq et H. Rochais. 8 vols., Rome, 1960–1977. BnF ms lat 14859. Henry of Clairvaux/Albano, De peregrinante civitate Dei, PL 204, 360.

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Le livre des sentences de l’inquisiteur Bernard Gui: 1308–1323. ed. and trans. Annette PalesGobilliard. Paris: CNRS, 2002. 2 vols. Le registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier (Évêque de Pamiers), 1318–1325, traduit et annoté par Jean Duvernoy; préf. de Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Paris-New York: Mouton, 1978, 3 vols. Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, évêque de Pamiers (1318–1325) (Manuscrit no Vat. Latin 4030 de la Bibliothèque vaticane), publié avec introduction et notes par Jean Duvernoy. Toulouse, 1965, 3 vols. L’inquisiteur Geoffroy d’Ablis et les cathares du comté de Foix: (1308–1309), ed. and trans. Annette Pales-Gobilliard. Paris: CNRS, 1984. Petrus Venerabilis, Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos. ed. J. Fearns. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968. Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, Hystoria Albigensis. éd. P. Guébin et E. Lyon. Paris, 1926. Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, I (1116– 1220), ed. J. Canivez. Louvain, 1933. Victorinus, Commentarii in epistulas Pauli, In epistulam ad Philippenses, PL 8, 1224–25. Secondary literature Alverny, M.-Th. d’, Alain de Lille: Textes inédits. Paris, 1965. Bériou, N., L’avènement des maîtres de la Parole: la prédication à Paris au XIII e siècle. Paris, 1998. 2 vols. (Collection des études augustiniennes: Série Moyen Age et temps modernes 31–32). Bird, J., Heresy, Crusade and Reform in the Circle of Peter the Chanter, c. 1187 to c. 1240 Oxford, 2001 [D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 2001]. Bornert, R. ‘La célébration de la sainte croix dans le rite byzantin’, in La Maison-Dieu 75, 1963, 106–108. Brenon, B., Le vrai visage du Catharisme. Portet-sur-Garonne, 1995. Brundage, J., ‘Cruce Signari: the Rite for Taking the Cross in England,’ Traditio 12, 1966, 289–310. Chazan, R., Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1997. Duvernoy, J., La religion des Cathares, Toulouse: Privat, 1976. Geest, P. van, ‘Augustine’s thoughts on how God may be represented’ in: W. van Asselt, P. van Geest, D. Mueller, Th. Salemink (eds), Iconoclasm and Iconoclash. Struggle for Religious Identity, Leiden, 2007. Hamilton, B. ‘Introduction,’ in: Hugh Eteriano, Contra Patarenos, ed. and trans. Janet Hamilton, Leiden, 2005, 20–21. ———, ‘The Cathars and Christian Perfection’, in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life. Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff, ed. P. Biller and B. Dobson, Woodbridge, 1999. Hauréau, B., ‘Mémoire sur la vie et quelques oeuvres d’Alain de Lille’, Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 1886. Iogna-Prat, D., Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam 1000–1150. Paris, 1998. ———, Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam 1000–1150. Paris, 1998. Kienzle, B.M., ‘Inimici crucis: la théologie de la croix et la persécution du catharisme’, in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (ed.), Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan—Histoire et religiosité d’une communaute villageoise au Moyen Age, (Actes du colloque de Montaillou, 25–27 aout 2000), Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, 2001, 283–99 (= Kienzle, 2001a). ———, ‘Modern Performance Theory and Medieval Sermons’, in The Sermon in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Muessig, Leiden, 2001, 105–109; (= Kienzle 2001b). ———, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade (1145–1229): Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard, Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2001.

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———, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade (1145–1229): Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard/ Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2001 [Kienzle 2001c]. Leclercq, J., ‘La dévotion médiévale envers le Crucié’, La Maison-Dieu 75 (1963), 119–32. Madigan, K., ‘High Medieval Interpretations of Gethsemane in Patristic Context: Some Reections on Continuity and Tradition in Christian Thought,’ Harvard Theological Review 88/1 ( January 1995), 157–73. ———, ‘On the Reception of Hilary of Poitiers in the High Middle Ages: A Study in the Discontinuity of Tradition in Christian Thought,’ Journal of Religion 78/2 (April 1998), 213–29. Maier, Chr. T., Crusade Propaganda and Ideology. Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Moore, R.I., The Origins of European Dissent. Toronto-Buffalo-London, 1994. Newman, B., God and the Goddesses. Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 2003). Pennington, K., ‘The Rite for Taking the Cross in the Twelfth Century,’ Traditio 30 (1974), 429–35. Tyerman, Chr., The Invention of the Crusades (Toronto-Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 1998. Vogel, C., ‘La signation dans l’église des premiers siècles’, in La Maison-Dieu 75, 1963, 46–49.

15. POOR BUILDING: THE CASE OF THE FRIARS MINOR Gerard Pieter Freeman (University of Tilburg) Introduction Nearing the small town of Assisi, one sees already from afar the huge buttresses which support the friary and the church where Francis is buried. The tomb of the little poor man is surrounded by numerous works of art of the highest quality which are rightly included in the World Heritage list of the UNESCO, but Francis’ poverty has become invisible. A few kilometres further, down in the plain, lies the little chapel of Portiuncula or St. Mary of the Angels, where Francis started his movement together with his rst brothers. The chapel has been preserved but is surrounded by a pompous, baroque basilica which does not hide Francis’ poverty but rather makes it a tourist attraction. In this article I examine the contrast between Francis’ tomb and the little chapel in the plain. on the one hand, and the wealth which surrounds them, on the other. Or in the terms of this collection of articles, what is the relation between the mental image that gave identity and cohesion to Francis and his brothers, on the one hand, and the material images that were produced by and for the Friars Minor during the rst sixty years of the thirteenth century, on the other? The article is divided in three parts. The rst part focuses on the mental image. The second and most important part deals with the building regulations of the rst Friars Minor. They will be considered against the background of the building regulations of other similar religious movements and tested by the factual building practice. The third part touches briey on some aspects of the way Christ and Francis are portrayed. It shows that the relation between mental and material images is closer in Franciscan iconography than in Franciscan architecture.

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The central metaphor or the mental image which determined the identity of the rst Friars Minor was the image of the poor Christ. Christ ‘was poor and a stranger and lived on alms—He, the Blessed Virgin, and his disciples’ (Earlier Rule 9,5). Christ’s poverty, his patience in suffering, his association with ‘poor people and those considered of little value’ motivated Francis and his rst brothers. They gave meaning and direction to their actions and determined the way the brothers shaped their lives. Various heterogeneous elements came together in their image of Christ: – the will to share the life of poor and despised people; – the readiness to beg, even though this was shameful; – the desire to be brothers and to deal with one another in such a way that no one is master and everyone is servant; – and the conviction that God is best made visible in His humiliation and emptying Himself, in the crib and on the cross, which Jesus freely accepted in solidarity with humankind for the sake of its redemption and its liberation. From a systematic point of view, the image of the poor Christ has three aspects: mystical, social and ascetic. The mystical dimension refers to the way Francis and his brothers looked at Christ: as a brother who begs and, in his humiliation, nds his exaltation. The social dimension points to the open, world-wide character of the rst brotherhood, not only among the brothers themselves but also together with those who are marginalised and excluded. The ascetic aspect of poverty usually receives the greatest emphasis; it describes how poorly and miserably the rst brothers lived and how much they had to deny themselves. It is remarkable that the writings of Francis emphasize the mystical and social aspects far more than the ascetic, and that the ascetic is mainly seen as a logical consequence of the other two aspects: poverty is good because it brings the Friar Minor closer to Christ and establishes a common bond with those who are poor against their will, and not because poverty by itself is of great value. However, those who in the thirteenth century wrote Francis’ biography, turned things around. The social side received less emphasis than the ascetic aspect (Freeman, 2006). It is not difcult to make the general statement that Francis and his brothers were guided by the image of the poor Christ. But in order to

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determine the function of this image for the rst Friars Minor, I have rst to remove some misunderstandings. I mention three. First, it may be suggested, that the image of the poor Christ was unique for the Friars Minor. This is not at all the case. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the poverty of Christ was one of the most popular images among the newer religious movements, both within and outside the Catholic Church. Waldensians, Humiliati and Dominicans took their orientation in life from the poor Christ. Also the Cistercians, who originated in the twelfth century, focussed on evangelical poverty (Mollat, 1978; Menestò, 1991). Second, when we speak too easily about ‘the central image’, we may foster a way of speech that presents poverty as an abstract ideal, as if Francis had discovered a principle or norm which the brothers had to translate into practice. This view is often found in modern historiography.1 It ts in the standard scheme according to which, after the high ideals of the founder, there follows the hard reality in which his followers had to adapt themselves to everyday life. This scheme is the modern variant of the old hagiographic stereotype of the élan of the founder and the lukewarmness of his followers, not the result of critical research because it often is its ‘obvious’ presupposition. The third problem is connected with the previous one. The statement, in itself correct, that the poor Christ functions as the central image of the rst Friars Minor can work as a simplication of the complex history which they had to pass through to nd their identity or rather their way of life. The evolution of the rst Friars Minor is thereby reduced to a manageable, but unimaginative story that does not do justice to the dynamism that characterizes the development of the early Franciscan movement. This is unnecessary. The various stages of the development can be followed in the editorial layers of the so-called Earlier Rule or the Rule without a Bull (Flood & Matura, 1975; Desbonnets, 1988). From a methodological point of view, it is most important to sketch the history of the early Franciscan movement starting not from the well-known end results, but from the wavering and open initial stages: not a teleological but a genetic historiography where the growing number of more specic regulations is not the inevitable result 1 To give some examples: Feld, 1994, 189–214. The author regards St. Francis way of life as a set of abstract ideals, regulations and prohibitions. He stands in the tradition of Felder, 1935, and Esser, 1966. Lambert (Lambert, 1961) analyses in his second chapter the concept of poverty in the same way.

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of a predictable process, but the contingent and often unintentional side-effect of a dynamic development. In other words, the central image of the poor Christ was not the beginning, but the result of the choice of Francis and his brothers ‘to leave the world’, that is to leave Assisi and the values and certainties of its citizens. The brothers found and strengthened their identity by interpreting their daily experiences in the light of the Gospel texts they read, and the other way round. For the rst Friars Minor the image of the poor Christ did not function as an abstract ideal which all the brothers had to comply with, nor as an advertising slogan which had to recommend them as a new and better kind of Christians, but rather as the focus of their way of life and their orientation, captured in a simple and, in that sense, attractive image. The image of the poor Christ was not meant to draw a borderline between the brothers and the outside world. The brothers did not propagate their view of Christ as the only correct view of Christianity. They did not consider their way of life the only possible one to be imposed on others. The Kantian imperative (which in its naive form says that good is only what is good for everyone) was completely foreign to the rst Friars Minor, and, indeed, to all medieval people. In the medieval view every order, every estate in society had its own task. Naturally, Francis did not want everyone to go begging. For then there would be no one whom the brothers could ask for alms.2 The rst brothers had an aversion from criticising others because they considered this to be contrary to the Gospel. ‘Do not judge and you will not be judged’ (Mt 7,1; Lk 6,37; cf. Earlier Rule 11; Later Rule 3). In the writings of Francis no condemnation of third persons can be found. One quotation should be sufcient here: I admonish and exhort [the brothers] not to look down upon or judge those whom they see dressed in soft and ne clothes and enjoying the choicest food and drink, but rather let everyone judge and look down upon himself (Later Rule 2,17).

2 ‘He would also say: “There is an exchange [commercium] between the brothers and the world: they owe the world good example, and the world owes them the supply of necessities of life. When they break faith and withdraw their good example, the world withdraws its helping hand, a just judgment”.’ Thomas of Celano, in Armstrong, 2000, 294. See also par. 146, p. 341: ‘Although he wanted his sons to keep peace with all, and to behave as little ones toward everyone, he taught them to be particularly humble towards the clerics (. . .) He used to say: “We have been sent to help clerics for the salvation of souls so that we may make up whatever may be lacking in them”.’

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Material images It is not an easy task to look for material images produced by the rst Friars Minor. The earliest generation of Friars Minor did not leave behind any works of art in the usual sense of the word. Francis did restore churches, but it is no longer possible to establish the nature and extent of the restoration of the two churches that still exist today, the above mentioned Portiuncula chapel and the church of San Damiano near Assisi. Only three texts which Francis wrote with his own hand, have been preserved. On one of them he drew the Greek letter Tau and, underneath, a human skull. Maybe a second Tau of his hand has been preserved (Freeman 2003, 142). The generation after Francis has left behind much more material, especially paintings and buildings. This article pays special attention to architecture, mainly because the crosses and Francis’ retables which can be found in Franciscan churches, have already been studied much more extensively (Krüger, Frugoni, Cook), but also because the general constitutions of the Friars Minor contain building regulations which make it possible to compare norm and practice in this eld. The building regulations and the buildings themselves have not been made by the rst generation but by the second. This enables us to examine how the central values of Francis and his rst brothers developed at the time of the rst institutionalization. During the rst years, the Friars Minor did not have any houses of their own at all. In his Later Rule (1223; ch. 6,1) Francis forbids his brothers to possess houses, but in his Testament (1226) he speaks a different language. He declares that the brothers may only receive churches or houses which are in accordance with the holy poverty they have promised to perform (Testament 24). The chronicler Jordan of Giano, who around 1262 dictates his memories of the arrival of the brothers in Germany, makes some interesting observations. He mentions that in 1222 the brothers gathered for their provincial chapter in Worms but could not hold it in their residence because it was small and unsuitable. They moved therefore to the cathedral where they said the ofce together with the canons of the cathedral, each group on their own side of the choir. In 1225, the brothers took up residence in the church of the Holy Spirit in Erfurt, which at that time was abandoned. The procurator asked Jordan if he wanted a cloister (claustrum) to be built for them, but Jordan replied that he did not know what a cloister was. ‘Just build us a house near the water so that we can go down to it to wash

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our feet.’ In the same year the brothers were put up in a house close to the church in Nordhausen. In 1231 for the rst time, a church was built for the brothers in Magdeburg-Neustadt. Except for the church they had nothing in Neustadt. In the old city they had a hospicium. ( Jordan: 26, 43, 44 and 48). Thanks to the English chronicler Thomas of Eccleston, we know that the brothers in London had a house, but they went to the parish church for the liturgy. Also in Paris, the brothers preached and prayed in their parish church because they did not have a chapel of their own (Eccleston, 1961, collation 3 and 6). Gradually the building of houses and churches became quite common; hence regulations had to be made. The oldest complete version of the constitutions which has been preserved, dates from 1260. In that year the General Chapter under the guidance of Bonaventure, the seventh minister general of the Order of Friars Minor, issued a new series of regulations. They are known as the Constitutions of Narbonne, after the place where the chapter was held. According to the tireless chronicler Salimbene, Bonaventure did not add much to the already existing regulations, but put them in a better order and systematised the regulations about punishments (Scalia, 1991, 233; Baird, 1986, 150–151). The regulations for buildings and objects of art are placed in the third chapter, entitled De observantia paupertatis. Among the prohibition to touch money, take loans, place collection boxes in churches, accept deposits from others, possess thuribles, crosses and cruets made of gold or silver, use chasubles made of silk or embroidered with gold or have more chalices than necessary, a few regulations are inserted which directly concern the building and furnishing of churches. The relevant texts read in translation as follows: 15. Because display and extravagance are in direct conict with poverty, we decide that architectural display in paintings, ceilings, windows, columns and the like is to be avoided. Also extravagance in length, breadth and height is to be avoided in accordance with local circumstances. 17. Churches may not have vaults made of stone, except the main chapel [i.e. the apsis]. From now on the belfry may never have the form of a separate belltower. 18. From now on stained-glass windows, depicting stories from the bible or sacred history, will never be made, with the exception of the principal window behind the main altar. This may have images of the Crucied, the Blessed Virgin, St. John (the Evangelist), St.

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Francis and St. Anthony. If (other images) are made later, they will be removed by the visitator (Bihl, 1941, 47–48). A comparison with the constitutions from before 1260 of which only fragments have been preserved, shows that almost all quoted regulations are older than 1260 (Cenci, 1990, 2003 and 2004). Probably they have been formulated already in 1239, the rst year a series of constitutions was promulgated. Only the prohibition of stone vaults dates from 1260 as is clear from the decisions of the Chapter of that year, which have been published separately. The expression: ‘from now on’ indicates that we have to do with something new (Delorme, 1910, 503). The same chapter decisions of 1260 state also that the minister general had the possibility to grant a dispensation in this matter, but this possibility was only taken up in the constitutions in 1292 at the general chapter of Paris. A further comparison between the regulations issued at the general chapter of Assisi in 1279 and those of the just mentioned chapter of Paris of 1292 does not indicate any signicant changes. Only the prohibition of images is further extended to include not only stained-glass windows, but also retables that are placed on the altar, and other panels (Bihl, 1941). These regulations raise three questions. First, how unique are these regulations in comparison with those of other Orders; second, what are the motives for these regulations, and third, how have they been put into practice? I will deal with each question separately in what follows. Comparison with other Orders The best way to understand the building regulations in the constitutions of the Friars Minor is to compare them with similar regulations of other Orders. The Friars Minor were not the rst to formulate such regulations. To start with their nearest neighbours, the constitutions of the Dominicans determined from 1228 onwards: The houses of our brothers shall be modest and unpretentious. The walls, except the attic (solarium), shall not be more than twelve feet high or twenty feet including the attic. The church which shall not be more than thirty feet high, shall not have stone vaults, except perhaps above the choir and sacristy. The building of new spaces has always to be done under the supervision of three members of the community.

The oldest constitutions of the Carthusians, which were made a century earlier, in 1127, do not have any specic regulations for the building

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of churches and monasteries, but they too contain a prohibition on sacral luxury: In our churches we do not have any gold or silver ornaments, except the chalice and the calamus through which the blood of the Lord is consumed. We refrain from tapestries or carpets (Guigo, 1984, 244).

Compared with the statutes of other Orders, those of the Cistercians pay greater attention to various regulations regarding the church building and its decoration. Of all the textile fabrics used in church, only stole and maniple may be made of silk. Chasubles may have only one colour. Gold, silver and jewels are forbidden. The chalice and the stula (the straw through which the sacred wine is drunk) may be made of silver or gilded, but not made of gold. Statues and paintings are forbidden with the exception of the cross that may be painted. A separate bell tower and stained-glass windows are also forbidden (Rudolph, 1990, 184–186). The other reform Orders of the twelfth century have similar regulations. This short survey shows that elsewhere parallels of the regulations of the Friars Minor existed. The prohibition of stained-glass windows and bell towers is found with the Cistercians; the prohibition of stone vaults with the Dominicans. The prohibition of (stone) images resembles regulations of the Cistercians. The Friars Minor have hardly any specic regulations of their own regarding architecture. They do, however, regarding paintings. I will briey return to this issue at the end. Motives The motives for the prudent attitude toward pomp and circumstance in architecture also show similarities with those of other Orders. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks the loudest and clearest on this matter in his Apologia ad Guillelmum Abatem, written in 1125 (Leclercq & Casey, 1970). In this splendid and at times razor-sharp text Bernard turns against grotesque statues which he nds too worldly, too frivolous, and too ostentatious. Bernard’s Apologia, however, does not only deal with art and architecture. In a self-critical way, he also discusses the shortcomings of the Cistercians and criticizes aspects of the life of luxury of the monks of Cluny: their excess in food and drink, their expensive and fashionable clothes, the pomp and circumstance with which the abbots and their suite travel around. A more detailed research of the motives given by Bernard results in the following two. First, curiositas and superuitas, display of wealth

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and extravagance are harmful to the monks themselves because they distract from the concentration on prayer and lead to a false sense of self-respect: pride triumphs over humility. This motive concerns the inner world of the monks. The second motive regards the outer world: wealth disparages poverty: ‘Tell me, O poor men—if you are really poor men—why is there gold in this holy place?’ (Leclercq & Casey, 1970, par. 28). Bishops, so Bernard continues, must stimulate the devotion of people with worldly ornaments. Monks should not need those any more. Moreover, the display of wealth and splendour in churches promotes the generosity of the people: ‘the richer a place appears, the more freely offerings ow in.’ But while ‘the walls of the church are aglow, the poor of the Church go hungry. The stones of the church are covered with gold, while its children are left naked. The food of the poor is taken to feed the eyes of the rich.’ Thus, Bernard’s aversion from expensive objects is not only based on individual or collective ascesis. The element of solidarity with the poor plays an important role: money spent on art, cannot be given in charity. Because of the links of this present volume with the city of Utrecht, I feel I must refer here to the polemic about the tower which till today is the pride of the city, the tower of the cathedral or Domtoren. Two hundred and fty years after Bernard, around 1370, the religious innovator and inspiring force behind the Devotio Moderna, Geert Grote, protested against the building of this tower (Hofman, 2003, 777–806). He used the same kind of motives as Francis and Bernard. Geert Grote strongly opposed the decree of the bishop who wanted to facilitate the building of the tower by forcing the faithful to donate money. Grote argued that an unjust law cannot bind people. And in his view, the decree had many unjust aspects, the most important being that it failed to acknowledge the right of the poor. According to medieval canon law, one quarter of the church’s income belongs to the poor; a second quarter is meant for the building of churches, and the rest is for the bishop and the clergy. The bishop of Utrecht trampled on this division of goods. He was not supposed to deride the poor but to provide for them; to dispense the goods of the church to the poor, not to dissipate them (irrisor—provisor; dispensator—dissipator). The Friars Minor adduced motives that for a large part were similar to those of Bernard and Geert Grote. At the same time, however, they place their own accents. In the regulations themselves no motives are indicated. Instead we have to search for them in the legends of Francis. A good example can be found in the so-called Assisi Compilation, where

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Francis, in a very lapidary and striking way, states that the brothers must ‘always [consider] the holy poverty we have promised, and the good example we are bound to offer others’ (par. 58). The rst motive, poverty, we have met already in various other texts, but not yet the second one, the good example. For Francis it is very important what people will say. His reason for speaking about this is rst of all his concern for the credibility of the brothers: the brothers must do what they say. It is then that their message can be heard. An additional advantage is that the brothers retain the favour of the people. In the words of Francis: There is an exchange between the brothers and the world: they owe the world good example, and the world owes them the supply of necessities of life. When they break faith and withdraw their good example, the world withdraws its helping hand, a just judgment (Thomas of Celano, par. 70).

There are signicant agreements between the motives given by Bernard, Francis and Geert Grote in the twelfth, thirteenth and fteenth century. A common element is their concern for the poor. But there are also clear differences. Bernard speaks only to and about monks. He does not begrudge bishops their rich ornaments. Geert Grote’s argument is not so much derived from spiritual life, but from canon law: a bishop must use his revenues well and not fail the poor. Francis, in his turn, expresses more than the other two his concern about the ‘good example’ or, as we would say, the credibility of the brothers. The practice Did the Friars Minor keep to their building regulations? Expressions like ‘from now on’, which can be found in the regulations, make it likely that this was not always the case. In fact, anyone who recalls images of the San Francesco in Assisi, cannot but become sceptical about the effectiveness of the regulations. This is also the predominant tone in various modern studies. Let us therefore rst examine the negative argument, and turn our attention to the church where St. Francis is buried. When the constitutions of Narbonne were promulgated, the San Francesco had been built already. It is a double church, that is, a church with two stories. Probably it was planned in this way from the beginning in 1230 (Schenkluhn, 1991). Both stories have stone vaults. In the summer of 1253, pope

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Innocent IV was in Assisi. He stayed at the Franciscan friary next to the church, the so-called Sacro Convento. He consecrated the church in May but wrote in a letter, dating from July that he thought the church to be incomplete. Therefore, he allowed a collection of money to be held, an action in gross contradiction to the values, rules and practices of the Friars Minor. In a second letter, he gave permission to receive ‘books, thuribles, crucixes, plates of gold or silver, tunics, dalmatics, chasubles, capes or pluvials and other vestments and paraments of silk or other material (. . .), big and small bells, other ornaments and church vessels.’ Because he knew that the Friars Minor might possibly evade this kind of privileges by immediately doing away with the gifts they received, he strictly prohibited the general and provincial ministers, custodians and guardians, the other brothers, the general or provincial chapters or anybody inside or outside the Order, to give away, remove or take away, mortgage, sell or alienate in other ways these gifts without previous written permission from the Apostolic See (Sbaralea, 1759, 666–667). Earlier on, the brothers in the Northern-European provinces had been angry because brother Elias, the successor of Francis, had imposed taxes on them for building the San Francesco ( Jordan: par. 61; Eccleston, 1961, coll. 51). An apocryphal story of the fourteenth century relates how brother Elias placed a marble collection plate in front of the church. When brother Leo, one of the closest condants of Francis, saw this, he went to Perugia to consult brother Giles, another condant. Leo asked Giles whether he should break the collection plate to pieces. With tears in his eyes, Giles looked at Leo and said: ‘After your death, you can go and destroy it, but don’t do it when you are still alive, because the persecutions of brother Elias are unbearable.’ Brother Leo understood, but all the same broke the red-marble plate completely into pieces. Angrily, brother Elias ordered his servants to give a good beating to Leo and his mates. Thereafter the brothers concerned had to leave Assisi. As a result there was great unrest among the brothers (Chronica 33 and 72; Eccleston, 1961). The story has probably a historical core and a legendary presentation. I think that the zeal with which Elias promoted the building of the San Francesco and the anger which this caused among the brothers, belong to the historical core. But the story relating the row about the marble plate is hardly credible. Brother Elias, the successor of Francis, was demoted by the pope in 1239 because of a number of complaints made by other brothers. They had put together a whole document on

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what Elias had done wrong in their eyes. This story, however, does not gure in this document of the thirteenth century. Yet it expresses very well the aversion which groups of Friars Minor felt, to the curiositas and superuitas that were introduced in the church of St. Francis. The decoration of the San Francesco with objects of art and frescoes was paid for by the popes. This happened mainly after 1260. Before that time, only a series of distemper paintings by the so-called St. Francis Master had been made: ve mural paintings with scenes from Francis’ life and, on the opposite wall, ve corresponding scenes from the life of Christ. Although the place of the paintings (in the nave and not in the apsis) and the material (paint instead of stained-glass) do not correspond to the regulations of Narbonne, the painter keeps to the persons who are allowed by the constitutions: Christ and Francis. Clearly, the regulations of Narbonne have not been observed in the San Francesco. But there are attenuating circumstances. The most important one is certainly the fact that, from the very beginning, the pope was the owner of the church. The Friars Minor, therefore, had no authority over the church and its decoration. Thus the constitutions of Narbonnes had no validity in the very centre of the Order of the Friars Minor: a bizarre situation. As a result, the church where Francis was buried, occupied a peculiar place among the churches of the Friars Minor. It was a cause of controversy for the friars, while at the same time it was seen as an ideal model for accommodating a large number of pilgrims. This is evident from a quotation from Archbishop Federico Visconti of Pisa. On the feast of St. Francis in 1260, the year the constitutions of Narbonne were promulgated, he preached a sermon: ‘At present, so many men and women visit the San Francesco in Assisi to obtain remission of their sins, and rightly so, for he is a glorious saint of our times, and glorious and very beautiful and spacious is his church which received many privileges and treasures from pope Innocent IV. And this is how churches of this kind of saints have to be: it should be a pleasure for the soul to go there, to stay there and to return there often.’ The church of the Franciscans in Pisa was, however, too cramped and too small, he said: ‘Nobody wants to return a second time to hear a sermon. People say to each other: I won’t go there again for the other day I was crushed so much so that my head and my feet are still aching’ (Bihl, 1908, 653). The archbishop had just laid the rst stone for a more spacious Franciscan church in Pisa, and was trying to raise

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funds to complete it. He had no qualms of conscience about poverty in building. His concern, he might have argued, was more practical. The friars had good reasons to build large and spacious churches for their message should be heard by as many people as possible. Whoever surveys the enormous building activity by and for the Franciscans, and is prepared to think away the numerous extensions of later centuries and to concentrate on the average churches rather than on the top ones, must conclude that, even though in most instances the regulations of Narbonne were not followed to the letter, yet most Franciscan churches were austere and not extravagant. The second church brother Elias built, the San Francesco of Cortona (1245), had a wooden ceiling and a simple belfry, exactly as would be laid down fteen years later in the constitutions of Narbonne. Contrary to the Cistercians and, later, the Capuchins, the rst Franciscans did not develop obligatory models for their friaries and churches which would have led to a single, distinctive and recognizable building style. Now, everywhere local inuences can be observed. A Franciscan church in Lübeck, Germany, is quite different from one in Bragança, Portugal. The lack of uniform models had an advantage: it gave the brothers an opportunity to work with local craftsmen. This beneted their acclimatization. The brothers wanted to be dependent on the people among whom they lived. This dependency enhanced the credibility of their message. Rather soon, however, they met with a remarkable paradox: if the friars lived in poverty, their example would be more effective. This, in turn, would lead to more almsgiving. More money, however, implied a loss of the poverty that had made them so popular in the rst place. There was no simple solution for this dilemma. A refusal of the people’s gifts was often not an option, because it might offend the pious benefactors. Yet, signs of poverty and austerity remained visible everywhere, but they were not uniform. Mostly, Franciscan churches had no [separate] campanile, but a simple belfry. A tribune or a transept might be missing too. The chevet, the apsidal end of the church, might be at like in Cistercian churches. Often, as we have seen, there were no vaults of stone, but wooden ceilings (Schenkluhn 2000, Coomans). This austere architectural style, however, did not distinguish the Friars Minor from other Mendicant Orders or from the Cistercians. All these Orders followed an austere and serious style which found its origin in a spirituality in which the right of the poor and the credibility of the

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monks, canons or friars were essential. We may presuppose that the image of the poor Christ played a role in the background, but it was rarely made explicit. Painting In order to obtain a better insight in the distinctive role of the Friars Minor and their image of the poor Christ, I will briey examine the paintings which the Friars Minor preferred to have in their churches: monumental crosses and paintings of Francis. The latter are specic to the churches of the Friars Minor. Painted crosses, on the other hand, are present in all kinds of churches, but the development in the representation of the Crucied Christ shows specically Franciscan traits. Crosses with the risen Lord are found in Umbria from the middle of the twelfth century onward (Sandberg–Vavala). On these crosses Christ stands calm and straight with open eyes as the risen Lord, the Son of the living God. Crosses with the suffering Christ appear only later. Christ’s body is then painfully twisted, his eyes are closed and his head rests on his right shoulder: he is dead. In itself this type of cross is old. The cross of Gero in the cathedral of Cologne, which dates from the tenth century, is one of the oldest and best known examples. The rapid spread of this last type in the thirteenth century in Central Italy is most probably due to the propaganda of the Friars Minor (Russo). The cross which Giunta Pisano painted for the San Francesco in Assisi in 1236, was the rst. This cross has been lost, but a few years later Giunta painted another one for the Santa Maria degli Angeli where at present it can be seen in the museum (Lunghi). Giunta introduced still another change: he replaced the crowded scenes which in many older crosses are found next to the corpus, with a picture of Mary on the left and of John on the right of Christ’s arms. They keep a hand against their cheek as a sign of mourning. Through this simplication, the crosses became more expressive: they called for compassion. In a short time, Giunta’s type became quite popular under the inuence of the preaching of the Friars Minor who emphasized the human suffering of Christ. Some years later, a small gure was added to the mourning Mary and John: Francis who kisses the feet of Christ and thus shows that he is the ‘modern’ person par excellence who, with heart and soul, has immersed himself in Jesus’ passion and has followed His example most faithfully.

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Also the paintings which depicted scenes from Jesus’ passion like the betrayal by Judas, or Jesus being mocked or stripped off his clothes, show an increasing emphasis on the passion, the humility and the poverty of Christ. The Friars Minor often commissioned those paintings and strongly promoted this shift. Signicant in this context is a panel by Guido da Siena which is preserved in the ‘Catharijneconvent’ in Utrecht. Christ ascends the ladder to the cross so eagerly that he skips the rst rung (Derbes, 1996, 146; Vos &Van Os, 1989, 120–124). Beside the monumental crosses, there appeared, especially in Franciscan churches in Tuscany, big altar tables, panels where Francis stands in the centre and is surrounded by a number of scenes from his life (Krüger). Initially these scenes depicted mainly miracles Francis worked after his death as if to emphasize that the Holy Francis will not abandon his devotees. Later, scenes from his life became predominant, especially Francis’ sermon to the birds and his stigmatisation. Thus the Friars Minor who had commissioned those retables wished to emphasize that the two main tasks of the followers of Francis were: to preach to everyone and to follow Christ in his passion (Krüger, 1992; Cook, 1999). Images of Christ and Francis were allowed according to the constitutions of Narbonne. This permission made it possible that, in the freestanding paintings ordered by the Friars Minor, a new image was created of Jesus who, poor and humble, accepts His suffering, and of Francis who, in his suffering and simplicity, becomes a faithful follower of Jesus. Conclusions At the beginning of this article, I asked the question about the relation between the mental image the Friars Minor had of their own way of life, and the material images they produced. My study of the building regulations and practices indicates that there denitely exists a relation between mental and material images, but that this is not something original or unique to the Friars Minor. Carthusians, Cistercians, Dominicans and Friars Minor, to name only the most important Orders, all of them showed in their buildings and their decorations that they strove after simplicity and shunned luxury. In this they were guided by a few coherent motives: the imitation of the poor Christ, the identication of Christ’s followers with the poor in their surroundings, the promotion

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of concentration in prayer and the saving of money that could better be given to the poor. Thus there originated in the history of the Catholic Church a tradition that stood in sharp contrast to the dominant image of richly furnished and decorated churches and monasteries. This tradition has to be studied further. It does not seem difcult to me to demonstrate that also in later centuries there existed a precise, recognizable code which covered much more than the vault of a church or the bell-tower. It determined, for example, the material to be used: no silk, but linen chasubles; no gold or silver, but tin chalices, no gilded but wooden tabernacles. Such a research may not be difcult, but it falls outside the scope of this article. However, this tradition too is not free from ambivalence. I may be allowed to illustrate this with a little standard joke among religious of the twentieth century: ‘If the abbot (prior, guardian) had had more money, the monastery (priory, friary) would have become even poorer.’ Seven centuries earlier, the English chronicler Eccleston made a similar remark. The stone walls of the friary in Shrewsbury, a gift from Lawrence Cox, a rich citizen, had to be demolished by order of the provincial minister because they looked too expensive. Thereafter the citizen ‘built walls of mud with remarkable devotion and gentleness and at great expense’ (Eccleston, 1961, coll. 4). The will to erect poor buildings was widespread among religious. More specic to the Friars Minor is the way in which they in the pictorial decoration of their churches portrayed their love for the poor Christ. They depicted Him on the cross in a more dramatic fashion, not as the One who conquered death, but as the One who suffered and died on the cross, even if He did so out of his free will. In their depiction of Francis they emphasized Francis’ imitation of Christ in his suffering (stigmatisation), his simplicity and poverty. LITERATURE Primary literature Armstrong, R.J., Wayne Hellmann, J.A., & Short, W.J., (eds), Francis of Assisi; Early Documents, vol. I: the Saint, New York-London-Manila 1999. – Francis of Assisi, Earlier Rule, in: Armstrong, 1999, 63–86. – Francis of Assisi, Later Rule, in: Armstrong 1999, 99–106. ———, (eds), Francis of Assisi; Early Documents, vol. II: the Founder, New York/London/ Manila 2000.

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– Assisi Compilation, in: Armstrong, 2000, 118–230. – Thomas of Celano, Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, in: Armstrong 2000, 239–393. Baird, J.F., Baglivi, G., & Kane, J.R., (eds), The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, Bonghamton NY 1986. Bihl, M., (ed.), ‘E sermonibus Friderici de Vicecomitibus, archiep. Pisani, de S. Francisco (1263–67)’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 1 (1908) 652–655. ———, (ed.), ‘Statuta generalia Ordinis edita in capitulis generalibus celebratis Narbonae an. 1260, Assisii an. 1279 atque Parisiis an. 1292 (editio critica et synoptica)’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 34 (1941) 13–94; 284–358. ‘Chronica XXIV Generalium Ordinis minorum’, in: Analecta Franciscana III, Quaracchi, 1897. Delorme, F. (ed.), ‘Difnitiones Capituli Generalis Narbonensis (1260)’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 3 (1910) 491–504. Guigo I, Coutumes de Chartreuse par Guigues Ier, Paris, 1984 (Sources chrétiennes 313). Hermann P., (ed.), XIIIth Century Chronicles, Jordan of Giano, Thomas of Eccleston Salimbene degli Adami, Chicago 1961. – Eccleston, The Coming of the Friars Minor to England, in: Hermann, 1961, 91–191. – Jordan of Giano, Chronicle, in: Hermann, 1961, 17–77. Hofman, R., (ed.), Gerardi Magni, Contra Turrim Traiectensem, Turnhout, 2003 (Gerardi Magni Opera Omnia, Pars 1; CCCM 192). Leclercq (introd.), J., & Casey, M., (transl.), Cistercians and Cluniacs; St. Bernard’s Apologia to Abbot William, Kalamazoo 1970. Sbaralea, J.H., (ed.), Bullarium Franciscanum Romanorum ponticum constitutiones, epistolas, ac diplomata continens tribus ordinibus minorum, clarissarum, et poenitentium a seraphico Patriarcha Sancto Francisco institutis concessa ab illorum exordio ad nostra usque tempora, part I, Rome 1759. Scalia, G., (ed.), Salimbene de Adam, Cronaca. nuova edizione critica, Bari, 1966. Secondary literature Binding, G., Untermann, M., Kleine Kunstgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Ordensbaukunst in Deutschland, Darmstadt, 1993. Cenci, C., ‘De fratrum minorum constitutionibus praenarbonensibus’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 83 (1990) 50—95. ———, ‘Fragmenta priscarum constitutionum praenarbonensium’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum (2003) 289–300. ———, ‘Vestigia constitutionum praenarbonensium’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 97 (2004) 61–98. Cook, W.R., Images of St Francis of Assisi in painting, stone and glass from the earliest images to ca. 1320 in Italy; a Catalogue, Florence-Perth, 1999. Coomans, Th., ‘L’architectuyre médiévale des Ordres mendiants (franciscains, dominicains, carmes et augustins) en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas’, in Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire d’Art 70 (2001) 3–111. Derbes, A., Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy; Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant, Cambridge, 1996. Desbonnets, Th., From Intuition to Institution; the Franciscans, Chicago, 1988. Esser, K., Anfänge und ursprüngliche Zielsetzungen des Ordens der Minderbrüder, Leiden, 1966. Feld, H., Franziskus von Assisi und seine Bewegung, Darmstadt, 1994. Felder, H., Die Ideale des hl. Franziskus von Assisi, Paderborn, 1935. Flood, D., Matura, Th., The Birth of a Movement; a Study of the First Rule of St. Francis, Chicago, 1975. Freeman, G.P., ‘Kleine apologie van de franciscaanse armoede’, forthcoming in: Armzalig of armlastig? Armoede als vraagstuk en inspiratiebron voor de theologie, Utrecht, 2006 (Utrechtse Studies).

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———, Umbrië in de voetsporen van Franciscus, Haarlem, 2003 (Dominicus Thema). Frugoni, Ch., Francesco e l’invenzione delle Stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini no a Bonaventura e Giotto, Torino, 1993. Krüger, K., Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien; Gestalt und Funktionswandel des Tafelbildes im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1992. Lambert, M.D., Franciscan poverty. The doctrine of the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles in the franciscan order 1210–1323, London, 1961 [second, revised edition St. Bonaventure, New York, 1998]. Lunghi, E., Il crocisso di Giunta Pisano e l’icona del ‘Maestro di San Francesco’ alla Porziuncola, Assisi, 1995. Menestò, E., (ed.), La Conversione alla povertà nell’Italia dei secoli XII–XIV, Spoleto, 1991. Mollat, M., Les pauvres au moyen age; étude sociale, Paris, 1978. Rudolph, C., The « Things of Greater Importance »; Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude to Art, Pennsylvania, 1990. Russo, D., ‘Saint François, les franciscains et les représentations du Christ sur la croix en Ombrie au XIIIe siècle. Recherches sur la formation d’une image et sur une sensibilité esthétique au Moyen Age’, in Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Moyen Age—Temps modernes 96 (1984) 647–717. Sandberg-Vavala, E., La Croce dipinta italiana e l’iconograa della Passione, Verona, 1929. Schenkluhn, W., Architektur der Bettelorden; die Baukunst der Dominikaner und Franziskaner in Europa, Darmstadt, 2000. ———, San Francesco in Assisi: Ecclesia specialis; die Vision Papst Gregors I. von einer Erneuerung der Kirche, Darmstadt, 1991. Vos, R. and H. van Os, Aan de oorsprong van de Schilderkunst/The Birth of Panel Painting, ’s Gravenhage, 1989.

PART THREE

PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND CATHOLIC REFORMATION

16. THE PROHIBITION OF IMAGES AND PROTESTANT IDENTITY Willem J. van Asselt (Utrecht University) Introduction Although it could be argued that the image question was not a central theme of the Reformation, and that this controversy broke out when the Reformation movement had already found strong popular support, the rejection of the medieval cultus by the reformers implied by their rejection of images altered in a drastic way the life of a large part of the European population. As Carlos Eire observes, ‘it divided the continent into several types of religious societies, each visibly different from the other: not only Catholic versus Protestant, but Reformed versus Lutheran.’ (Eire 1986, 5–7) In line with Eire’s observation, Eamon Duffy wrote, ‘Reformation was a stripping away of familiar and beloved observances, the destruction of a vast and resonant world of symbols.’ (Duffy 2005, 591). Taken in its strict sense the term ‘iconoclasm’ means ‘hostility to religious images, a hostility that manifests itself in their destruction through a more or less ostentatious public act.’ (Michalski 1993, 75–76). According to this denition, however, a large number of events in Protestant lands cannot be regarded as iconoclasm in the strict sense. In the Lutheran churches, for example, there was only a partial reduction of the use of images, whereas in Calvinist territories a complete elimination of images took place. Moreover: ‘it is one thing to preach against images, and quite another thing to smash an altarpiece.’ (Eire 1986, 105) Iconoclastic theology and iconoclastic policy were not always in agreement during the era of the Reformation. In addition, when discussing Protestant iconoclasm, a distinction could be made between two essential forms of iconoclasm. According to Carlos Eire, there are two basic categories of Protestant iconoclasm: legal and illegal, which, in turn, may be subdivided into different types of iconoclastic activities, such as individual or isolated iconoclastic demonstrations or actions and collective forms of protest (Eire 1986, 151–165). Prior to the Reformation iconoclasm was illegal: the

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destruction of religious or sacred objects was legally seen as sacrilege and blasphemy. When city magistracies changed the law and ordered the removal or destruction of such images, iconoclasm became legal such as happened in Switzerland and Southern Germany. Undoubtedly, many factors played a role in the Protestant attack on Catholic worship and it is clear that iconoclasm occasioned important cultural, social and political changes. The most tangible change was the destruction of the cultic objects of previous generations. Thereby Protestant iconoclasm intensied the social and political divisions in Europe, for it tested and challenged both civic and ecclesiastical authorities. But in this contribution, it is argued that the social conicts created by the rejection of Catholic worship were at heart religious. They were motivated by the belief that church and society ought to conform to certain theological principles (Eire 1986, 313). Therefore, it seems plausible to maintain that the image issue as discussed by the main representatives of the Reformation (Karlstadt, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin) was not primarily motivated by political or social factors but by diverse theological principles and by sometimes different exegetical approaches, which were both developed in the context of a particular set of circumstances. God’s Transcendence as Justication of Iconoclasm: Karlstadt In his famous Ninety-Five theses of 1517, Luther did not explicitly address the issue of images; neither was the image problem on the agenda in the direct contacts between the Swiss reformers on the one hand and Luther and the Wittenberg circle on the other hand. Initially, therefore, Luther did not pay much attention to the prohibition of images. Only after the iconoclastic events in Wittenberg he explicitly addressed the question. It was Andreas Bodenstein (c. 1480– 1541), known as Karlstadt and known as a colleague of Martin Luther at Wittenberg University, who launched a rst attack on what was thought of as idolatry and idolatrous practices, such as the use of ‘holy water.’ This was in 1518 and by 1521 Karlstadt was focusing attention on the veneration of images and in January 1522 he was instigating iconoclastic riots in the town. Karlstadt’s strongest rejection of religious images, however, appeared early 1522, when he wrote On the abolition of Images to justify iconoclasm in Wittenberg.1 1 Full title: Von Abthuung der Bylder und das keyn Bedtler unter Christen seyn sollen, Wittenberg, 1522. This tract has been reprinted in an annotated edition by Hans Lietzmann,

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In it he argued that the spiritual realm could not be approached through images: ‘innitude cannot be conveyed by the nite’ ( nitum non est capax inniti, Eire 1986, 303). In this treatise Karlstadt cited numerous Old Testament passages to prove this point. Throughout his arguments he employed what can be called a ‘hermeneutic of transcendence’ involving a sharp dualism between matter and spirit, which allowed him to reject the idea that a distinction could be made between a physical image and its invisible or spiritual prototype. A prototype cannot be represented in the image, since material objects cannot objectify a spiritual reality. Material things are ‘deaf ’ and ‘dumb’ and unable to convey spiritual truth. In this way Karlstadt’s treatise provided a theoretical sanction for iconoclastic actions in Wittenberg, although it did not condone the use of force. It is, nevertheless, ‘the rst major Protestant treatise on the question of religious imagery, and proved to be one of the most inuential in the development of a Protestant theology of idolatry.’ (Eire 1986, 57–58) Christian Freedom: Luther Martin Luther profoundly disagreed with Karlstadt. From 1522 onwards he took the side of the more conservative reform and this decision was based on an intuitive rejection of Karlstadt’s radicalism rather than on theoretical considerations. Actually, political considerations at that time and the arrival at Wittenberg of a group of radicals, the so called ‘Zwickau prophets’, led by Nicolaus Storch, so worried Luther that he no longer hesitated in his attitude to the iconoclastic movement in Wittenberg. He returned to the city on March 1522 and from 9 until 16 March, one day after another, he delivered a series of sermons, which are known as the Invocavit Predigten, that is sermons for the rst Sunday of Lent. They were printed as a whole a year later, but the section Von Byldtnussen (On Images) was published immediately and had no fewer than seven further editions within a year.2 They were of decisive importance in dening Luther’s attitude to the issue of religious images.

entitled: Kleine Texte für theologische und philosophische Vorlesungen und Uebungen, no. 74, Bonn 1911. Page numbers given for the Abthuung refer to the Lietzmann edition. 2 The chapter On Images is edited in WA, vol. 10–III, 26–36. On the various editions, J. Benzing, 1966, I, no. 1320–1326.

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In these sermons Luther argued that Christian freedom required regard for the weak, the people who were horried by violence. Images should be tolerated, he argued, until they can be removed sine tumultu: ‘they would fall of themselves if people were taught and knew that before God images are nothing.’3 Therefore, the strategy of Karlstadt and his followers turned Christian freedom into compulsion and was nothing else than a repetition of the despised doctrine of justication by works. At the end of these sermons Luther developed from this notion of freedom his denition of religious images. Thus images are ‘weder gut noch böse’ (neither good nor bad); they are entities that are morally indifferent or adiaphora, a notion derived from the philosophy of the Stoics.4 In April and May 1522 nearly all the changes introduced by Karlstadt’s radical iconoclasm in Wittenberg during Luther’s absence at the Wartburg, were rescinded. Luther insisted that the images returned to the churches, although he warned for abuses in his Lent sermons of that year. Moreover, Luther told his many readers that the placing of images in the church by patrons and endowers with the intention of earning merit with God was entirely inconsistent with the doctrine of justication. For Luther, this was the greatest and most important and essential reason why images should be removed.5 In this application of the doctrine of justication on the issue of images Luther made a very interesting move: the Wittenberg iconoclasts who destroyed religious images were driven by the same motives as those, who erect altars and images to earn merit, namely, the doctrine of good works. In this connection Luther uses another argument, which derives from patristic and medieval criticism (for example Bernard of Clairvaux) of luxury and which was also brought forward by Karlstadt in his Abthuung der Bilder: instead of enhancing the splendour of the church and the status of patrons in erecting altars and chaples, the money should be given to the poor and the needy. In this context Luther wrote ‘das es besser gethan were, mit solchem gelde armen leute helffen denn nach dieser meinung viel Bilder setzen, sintemal Gott jenes geboten hat, dis aber

3 WABr 2 (no. 459), 474, lines 23–24: ‘Sponte sua caderent, si populus institutus sciret eas esse nihil coram Deo.’ 4 WA, vol. 10–III, 35: ‘. . . man lasse es frey sein sie zu haben oder nicht zu haben, allein das der gloub oder wahn davon sey, das wir mit unserem Bildestifften Gotte keinen dienst noch wolgefallen thun.’ 5 WA, vol. 10–III, 31.

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nicht.’6 For Luther, then, the question of religious art and images was closely linked to the social question. Much space in Luther’s sermons on images was devoted to passages from the Old and the New Testaments in which he tried to demonstrate that neither the Jewish religion nor the rst Christians categorically prohibited woks of religious art. He refers to the altars erected by Noah and Abraham (Genesis 8: 20; 12: 7), the Cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25: 18, 37: 7), St. Paul and the Dioskur sculpture on the ship (Acts 28: 11).7 Particularly, Luther’s interpretation of the locus classicus of the image debate, the story of the brazen serpent in Numbers 21: 9, is worth noting. Compared with Karlstadt’s interpretation of the same brazen serpent,8 one discovers a signicant difference between the two reformers. Unlike Karlstadt, Luther underlines the fact that it was Moses himself, the great lawgiver, who ‘created an image’ and that king Hezekiah smashed the brazen serpent only, when the Israelites began to worship it, and not sooner.9 It could be argued that the most important difference between Luther and Karlstadt, however, was their understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and material in worship. Luther rejected Karlstadt’s strong ‘puritan’ dualism of body and spirit, for the spiritual life could never be a totally disembodied affair. People need to worship with the aid of material and visual objects. In later clashes with Karlstadt Luther produced ‘a lasting formula to convey the usefulness of images’ (Michalski): images were zum Ansehen, zum Zeugnis, zum Gedächtnis, zum Zeichen (for recognition, for witness, for commemoration, for a sign, Michalski 1993, 19, 29, 176). No wonder, then, that compared with the other Protestant confessions, this understanding of the relationship between the material and spiritual in worship gave the Lutheran church its distinctive ceremonial and liturgical life. Spirit versus Flesh: Zwingli According to Heiko A. Oberman, there is no doubt that Karlstadt’s iconoclastic theology inuenced the Swiss reformers, and, at mid-century,

6 7 8 9

WA, vol. 10–III, 32. WA, vol. 10–III, 28. Karlstadt, Abthuug der Bylder, (ed. Lietzmann), 11. WA, vol. 10, III, pp. 27–28.

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the events in France and the Low Countries (Oberman 2003, 93–94). In regard to his iconoclastic policy, however, it seems doubtful to draw a direct line, for the simple reason that the major Swiss reformers like Zwingli and Calvin, did not advocate as radical an iconoclastic policy as Karlstadt did. Removal of images from churches was in the eye of the major continental reformers the duty of the magistrate, not of the people. The Zurich reforming initiatives, however, were driven by some specic exegetical and theological motives. They marked a division between the Lutheran and Reformed approach to images. It was caused by a different interpretation of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue (MacCulloch 2004, 141–142. See also von Campenhausen 1957, 96–128; M. Stirm 1977, 17–22, 139, 161, 229). In 1523, Leo Jud, a colleague and friend of the Swiss reformer Zwingli, preached a forceful sermon against images (cf. Aston 1988, 39–43; 373, 379–381; Michalski 1993, 19, 29, 176, MacCulloch 2004, 141–142). In this sermon he pointed out that the Jewish tradition looked upon the four verses of Ex. 20:4–6 (cf. Deut. 5:8–10) as the Second Commandment, whereas the Western Church up till then—under the inuence of Augustine—numbered the Commandments so as to make the Second Commandment (‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’) a subordinate part of the First Commandment. According to Jud, it was clear that the rst [way] of numbering gave the prohibition of images extra importance. Although Zwingli would not allow uncontrolled iconoclastic actions, since they might play into the hand of the still powerful Catholic faction in Zurich, he too, like Jud, vehemently preached from the pulpit against any delay in the removal of images from the churches. After a public debate on the question of images on 26–28 October 1523, with the participation of the clergy, leading reformers and a large number of the Zurich citizens, the Zurich magistrate called for the removal of all religious imagery from the churches in June 24, 1524. The next year Zwingli justied these ‘lawful’ iconoclastic acts in two extensive treatises on images, An Answer to Valentin Compar10 and De vera

10 H. Zwingli, Eine Antwort, Valentin Compar Gegeben 27 April 1525) edited in ZW, vol. 4, 35–159. The treatise was written against Valentin Compar, land secretary of the canton Uri, who had attacked Zwingil’s ideas on the Gospel, authority, images and purgatory. This document is now lost but its content can be reconstructed by means of Zwingli’s Answer. See also Eire, 1986, 83–86.

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et falsa religione commentarius (Commentary on the True and False Religion).11 In his Answer Zwingli made a sharp distinction between the Creator and the created in worship and argued that those who use images have the tendency to worship the created more than the Creator.12 In these works Zwingli opposed anything that decentralized God in Christian worship. In Zwingli’s view, nothing based on corporeal elements can lead to salvation (Michalski 1993, 50–59). Drawing on the arguments of the Byzantine iconoclasts, he categorically asserted that neither crucixes nor other images should be placed in the churches. After the Resurrection, Christ cannot be represented, since divinity cannot be shown. But images depicting the humanity of Christ were allowed in private homes. In the homes one can keep images of a historical nature and biblical histories, in churches every work of art becomes an idol, with the exception of ‘ornaments’ such as stainedglass windows. Where Zurich had abolished the religious images, other Swiss towns followed in a similar vein.13 The Glory and Majesty of God: Calvin Unlike the other reformers such as Luther and Zwingli, Calvin did not nd himself under the pressure of iconoclastic events, since Geneva had already abolished religious images in 1535. His thoughts on the removal of religious images, therefore, were not hindered by any tactical procedures in order to avoid illegal iconoclasm. In the Genevan Catechism, originally written in French in 1537 and then in Latin in 1538 (section 8.2), and in chapter 11 of the rst book of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, his analysis of the Second Commandment played an important role in his discussion of images.14 Like the Zurich reformers, he adopted a way of numbering the Decalogue, which was different from the system followed by the Roman Catholics and Lutherans.15

11

H. Zwingli, Commentarius de vera et falsa religione (March 1525) in: ZW, vol. 3, 590–912. ZW, vol. 4, 88: ‘Uss welchem nun clarlich volget, das die nit glöubig sind, die zu eim andren umb hillff zulouffend weder zu dem einigen, waren gott. Denn damit sind die glöubigen von den unglöbigen underscheiden, das die gloubigen oder vertrüwender allein zu gott louffend, aber die misstrüwendenn louffend zu den gschöpfften.’ 13 Eire, 1986, 112–165. There was iconoclasm in Berne (1528), Basel (1529) Neuchâtel (1530) and Geneva (1535) and some of it spread north again to southern Germany: Strasbourg and Nuremberg (1530). 14 Calvin, Institutes I, 11, 1–4 (Latin text in: Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta, ed. P. Barth and W. Niesel, Vol. III, Munich 19673). 15 Calvin, Institutes, I, 11, 2. See also Institutes, II, 8, 12: ‘Quare non de numero, sed 12

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Calvin’s pronouncements on religious images refer, rst of all, to the relationship of God to humanity. In his view the making of images is primarily a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence and attributes of God: his majesty and glory. ‘God’s majesty’, he wrote, ‘is sullied by an untting and absurd ction, when He, who is incorporeal is made to resemble corporeal matter, when He who is invisible is made to resemble a visible image, and when He who is Spirit is made to resemble an inanimate object, and when He who is immeasurable is assimilated to a puny bit of wood, stone or gold.’16 In order to correspond with God’s nature and attributes, Calvin argues, all worship of God must be spiritual and this means that God is to be honoured only according to his commands in Scripture.17 For Calvin this did not imply that God is a pure abstraction that has to be related to a likewise abstractly conceived humanity (Dowey 1994, 20–22). Neither is Calvin’s basic understanding of the divine-human relationship to be understood as a form of Platonic dualism, which juxtaposes the divine and the human, and contrasts the spiritual and the material.18 The primary referent of Calvin’s concept of spiritual and material is ‘the Pauline contrast between that which is motivated by the Spirit of God and that which is motivated by carnal, legalistic, humanly initiated attempts to please God.’ (Butin 1994, 419–431, esp. 422) Through the fall into sin, humanity has become involved in a ‘carnal’ existence that opposes the Spirit and spiritual worship. He has completely lost the spiritual dimension of his existence, and in order to approach and worship God correctly, he must transcend his own ‘carnal’ orientation. ‘For as long as our views are bounded by the earth, perfectly content with our own righteousness, wisdom and strength, we fondly atter ourselves and fancy we are little less than

secandi ratione ambigitur. Qui sic partiuntur ut tria praecepta dent primae tabulae, reliqua septem in secundam reiiciant, praeceptum de imaginibus numero expungunt, vel certe sub primo occultant: quum mandati loco haud dubie a Domino distincte positum sit; decimum vero, de non concupiscendis proximi rebus, inepte in duo concerpunt.’ For the rst division Calvin refers to Origin and Augistine (in his letter to Bonifacius), although Augustine sometimes, according to Calvin, opted for the second division, ‘quod in numero ternario (si tribus praeceptis conciatur prima tabula), magis eluceat mysterium trinitatis’ (ibidem). 16 Calvin, Institutes, I, 11, 2. 17 Calvin, Institutes, II, 8, 17. 18 Contra Eire, 1986, 197–198, who conates Calvin’s biblically rooted distinction between ‘Flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ with the quite different tendency of Neoplatonism to value the spiritual over the material, as if ‘material’ were the same as ‘external.’

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demigods.’19 The root of idolatry and the worship of images do not lie in the material world as such, but in man himself trying to nd the Creator in the created. From this Calvin concluded that the human mind is a perpetual workshop of idols (hominis ingenium perpetuam esse idolorum fabricam).20 In this connection it is worth noting how Calvin interpreted the passage in Scripture on the Cherubim placed on the Ark of the Covenant.21 Such passages seemed to allow the existence of images in the Old Testament. But Calvin did not use the argument that the cherubs on the Ark were a kind of ‘ornament’. In stead he attempted a new interpretation explaining the Cherubim as a veil protecting the majesty of God from the eyes of the people.22 Many other passages from the Institutes and other works of Calvin could be quoted in which he condemns the belief that elements of the divine power are found in some statue or image. They make clear that the Genevan reformer consistently sharpened the idea that the making of any images representing the divine falsify God’s glory and majesty. He also saw a connection between the image dispute and the Eucharistic dispute. Any other ‘images than those living symbols the Lord has consecrated by his own word’ should not be placed in the churches: ‘I mean the Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.’23 For Calvin, this notion that the Eucharist should be the only worthy image was ‘an iconoclastic principle par excellence.’ (Besançon 2000, 188) This does not mean that Calvin rejected all forms of art. ‘I am not so superstitious as to think that all visible representations of every kind are unlawful. But as sculpture and paintings are gifts of God, what I insist for is, that both shall be used purely and lawfully.’24 Moreover, in his progressively elaborated ordering of the Institutes Calvin developed an order and structure, an architectural plan, which he believed captures and illustrates the essential truth of Scripture. This text of the Institutes, which in Calvin’s opinion faithfully reected the ordered truth of Scripture, was undoubtedly meant by him to play a shaping role in the thinking and worship of God’s people. For Calvin, 19

Calvin, Institutes, I, 11, 3. Calvin, Institutes, I, 11, 8. 21 Calvin’s interpretation of the Cherubim on the Ark allows for an interesting comparison with Shulamith Laderman’s article in this volume. 22 Calvini Opera, vol. 26, p. 156. cf. Institutes, I, 11, 3. 23 Calvin, Institutes, I, 11, 13. 24 Calvin, Institutes, I, 11, 12. 20

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Christian faith and worship was a special kind of perception that involved new ways of understanding and even ‘seeing’ for which he often resorted to metaphors of sight. In many places in the Institutes he invited his readers, once the Spirit has opened their eyes, to ‘see’ themselves and the world through the eyes of faith. Therefore, it could be argued that in a certain sense the text of the Institutes as complemented by and reected in Calvin’s preaching of Scripture, is taking on some of the iconic functions that were previous carried by the ceremonies, images and even the drama of worship. From his humanist background, Calvin inherited a variety of rhetorical strategies by which to move his readers. According to William A. Dyrness, this structuring of the Institutes and subsequently Calvin’s view on divine worship encouraged a new aesthetic sensibility with his public (Dyrness 2004, 67). Iconoclasm and Protestant Identity From this short overview of the different positions regarding the image issue, it can be concluded that the Reformation iconoclasm was not a monolithic phenomenon, nor simply a philistine movement of religious vandalism. It was a multi-dimensional phenomenon with an enormous religious, political and social impact. It also became clear that it was motivated by different modes of thinking about the category of the image and the notion of visualization, reection and representation of the divine. Reformation iconoclasm became the earmark of a movement that consciously promoted it self as a religious reform, and that the very principles of reform were at the bottom theological (Eire 1986, 7). In can only be seen against the backdrop of (late) medieval piety. In late-medieval popular religion images functioned at a variety of levels and had many different levels of meaning. They functioned as symbols of order, status, and as symbols of identity. Iconoclasm, followed by iconoclastic act, therefore, involved a kind of deconstruction of one’s own religious and theological past. As Dyrness points out, ‘when people entered their own churches to take down the images, they were not entering the worship space of another, but they were going into what was once their own space. They were desecrating spaces where they themselves had worshipped.’ (Dyrness 2004, 48) The image controversy, therefore, must be recognized as one of the elements of ‘the self-afrmation’ of the Protestant movement (Moeller, 1980, 21).

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This observation, however, should not lead us to the conclusion that Protestant worship focused on Holy Scripture and sermons excluded all visual dimensions in its spirituality. It could be argued that the widely accepted view that Reformation faith became exclusively ‘verbal’ and ‘aural’, while Catholic spirituality was ‘visual’ is clearly a distortion of a complex realty. Recent medieval studies have pointed to the importance of hearing and reading (lectio) in medieval spirituality, while in many recent Reformation studies new attention is paid to the visual dimension in Protestant faith and culture. It would be better to say that Protestantism, in its own way, contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘popular images’. The printing press made it possible to produce woodcuts, pamphlets, ysheets and comic strips in which the papacy was depicted as a demonic inspired institution, the pope as gure of horror and ridicule, and the Catholic priesthood as corrupt and corrupting. This message was also spread on the stage through plays and poems, which had a great mass effect. They were read aloud in inns, workshops, or market- places or even posted up on walls in public places (Russel 1985, 56–79). The view that Protestantism implied a complete break with the Roman Catholic world of visual images, symbols and rituals is also falsied by the positive propaganda as construed in the various images of, for example of Luther, in which he was depicted as prophet and saint of ‘a very traditional, Catholic kind.’ (Scribner 1983, 17–21, esp. 20) What is more, in early modern times the Reformed too developed a religious tradition (exemplum tradition) in which they created their own visual culture in which living saints were celebrated: the reformer, the Protestant martyr, the godly preacher etc. In fact, saints were not abolished in Protestantism; only their intervention on behalf of mankind and their function as intermediary was rejected (Exalto 2005). Moreover, in protestant popular devotion all kind of ‘magic’ actions were carried out with the ‘Word of God’: bibles were put under the pillow of a woman in travail, in the cradle of a baby to protect it against evil spirits during the rst six weeks, and in the cofn of the deceased. All this seems to justify the conclusion that in early modern times the Protestant ‘image-breakers’ became, in their turn, ‘image-makers.’ They replaced the old medieval world of symbols and rituals by their own symbolic and ritual language in which some the old traditions reappeared. Despite its impressive theological enterprise and despite its iconoclastic attempts to reform medieval piety, the Reformation was

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not so radical and successful as suggested in the traditional historiography (Exalto, 2005, 51–52). At the same time, it becomes clear that the imagecontroversy during the Reformation did not only concern ‘iconoclasm’, the destruction of material images, but it also involved an ‘iconoclash’, that is to say, a clash between various mental depictions or diverging imaginations of the divine. In this way the internal Protestant imagecontroversy did not only contribute to the genesis and demarcation of the various Protestant identities, it was also used as a tool for a negative typecasting of the ‘the others’, especially the Roman Catholic Church. This need to judge and condemn others appears to be essential for drawing up and protecting Protestant identities. LITERATURE Primary literature Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta, ed. P. Barth and W. Niesel, Vol. III, Munich 19673. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Von Abthuung der Bylder und das keyn Bedtler unter Christen seyn sollen, Wittenberg, 1522 (ed. H. Lietzmann, entitled: Kleine Texte für theologische und philosophische Vorlesungen und Uebungen, no. 74, Bonn 1911). Martin Luther, WA Secondary literature Aston, M., England’s Iconoclasts: 1. Laws Against Images, Oxford, 1988. Benzing, J., Lutherbibliographie, Baden-Baden 1966, Vol. I. Besançon, A., The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, translated by Jane Marie Todd, Chicago 2000. Butin, Ph., ‘John Calvin’s Humanist Image of Popular Late-Medieval Piety and Its Contribution to Reformed Worship’, in Calvin Theological Journal 29/2 (1994), 419–431. Campenhausen, H. von, ‘Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation’ in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 68 (1957), 96–128. Dowey, E., The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, Grand Rapids 1994. Duffy, E., The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580, New Haven, 2nd ed. 2005. Dyrness, W.A., Reformed Theology and Visual Culture. The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards, Cambridge 2004. Eire, C.M.N., War Against the Idols. The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin, Cambridge 1986. Exalto, J., Gereformeerde heiligen. De religieuze exempeltraditie in vroegmodern Nederland, Amsterdam 2005. MacCulloch, D., The Reformation, London 2004. Michalski, S., The Reformation and the Visual Arts. The Protestant image question in Western and Eastern Europe, London-New York 1993. Moeller, B., ‘Die Basler Reformation in ihrem stadtgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang’, in Ecclesia Semper Reformanda, ed. H. Guggisberg, Basel 1980.

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Oberman, H.A., The Two Reformations. The Journey from the Last Days to the New World. ed. Donald Weinstein, New Haven 2003. Russel, P.A., Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southeast Germany 1521–1525, Cambridge 1985. Scribner, R.W., ‘The Reformer as Prophet and Saint: Sixteenth-Century Images of Luther, in History Today 33/11 (1983), 17–21. Stirm, M., Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation, Gütersloh 1977.

17. ASPECTS OF ICONOCLASM IN UTRECHT— TODAY AND IN THE PAST Casper Staal (Museum ‘Catharijneconvent’, Utrecht) Introduction: Conventicles and Iconoclasms In the sixteenth century the city of Utrecht was the ecclesiastical centre of the Northern Netherlands. In July and August 1566 the situation was intense. Preachers who propagated dissenting views of religion were not appreciated. Both the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities in Utrecht wanted to carry on in the traditional way. Initially, this implied that the devotees of the new religion travelled to IJsselstein, Culemborg and Amsterdam where preaching sermons was allowed. But in August 1566 the believers met outside the city of Utrecht. Dirk Kater, an Amsterdam merchant living in Utrecht managed to invite Jan Arentsz, an Alkmaar wicker worker, to come to the town. Thus it came about that on the fteenth of August, feast of the Assumption, the gospel was preached on the Loevenhoutsedijk, north of the town along the river de Vecht. Near to the Oostbroek Abbey on the eastern side, close to De Bilt, Petrus Gabriel delivered a sermon. Both localities were situated outside the town, but especially outside the jurisdiction of the town. Obviously the organizers of the meetings and the preachers proceeded with caution. Three days later, on Sunday 18 August, a sermon was preached considerably closer to the southern side of the town, in an orchard of the national commander of the German Order near to the Tolsteegpoort (‘poort’ = gate). The preacher there was ‘Squinting Gerrit’, a degenerate-looking Premonstratensian of the Middelburg Abbey, also called Gerrit van Kuilenberg. The town-council took no action, because they were aware of the iconoclasm that happened in West Flanders. The preachers could, in practice, go their own way, because the Utrecht municipality was afraid of the plundering of the monasteries outside the walls of the town and possibly also the unprotected satellite towns (Van Hulzen, 1932, 8–22).

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Of the sermons delivered at these eld meetings we have no details. The points in the sermons that Squinting Gerrit raised, for example, are unknown to us. Still, we know from alternative sources, such as rhetorical drama groups, the views of these Protestant pastors. Roman Catholics used images and representations to serve as a bible for the illiterate. The Calvinists and the Mennonites, however, considered these pictures irrelevant and thought them to be idols. In their view, worshipping images was idolatry, as is stated in Exodus 20: 4–5, Deuteronomy 5: 8 and Leviticus 19: 4; and 26: 1. Images were sacrilegious, because they attempted to depict the invisible divine. Gold, silver and velvet as means to clothe or embellish the idols were condemned. Indeed, the poor who were more likely to be seen as the embodiment of Christ went naked. Also the lighting of candles in front of the images was considered sinful. ‘Give the candles to the poor who are in darkness’ was the motto. Consequently, processions were forbidden as well. In addition to the adoration of images, these processions were often the cause of rows and lechery (Kaptein, 2002, 28). I do not know of any contemporary representations of conventicles. But that has not prevented us from having a clear picture of these meetings. Some other representations dating back from the sixteenth century have survived. The generally accepted view is that these events instigated the struggle for freedom from Spain. Eighteenth century illustrators of Dutch history had no scruples about depicting imaginary conventicles. A painting, dating from 1860, by Samuel de Poorter is a case in point. On the horizon we see the Utrecht Cathedral with the tower on the left. This means that we nd ourselves on the south side of the city. Therefore we may conclude that the sermon preached in the orchard near the Tolsteegpoort (see above) is depicted. Squinting Gerrit is standing on a wagon. The women are sitting on the ground. Armed men are standing by. Two noblemen on horseback are also present (Kootte, 2003, 251–253). Better known than De Poorter’s painting is the wall chart for primary schools by J.H. Isings of 1911. We can see Castle Vredenburg to the west of the town. According to Gerard Brandt in his ‘Historie der reformatie’ (History of the Reformation) published in 1677, a meeting in the open air took place there. The illustrator suggests that the people assembled were being red at from the castle, so that a girl was wounded. A heroic story, but not a true one. Van Hulzen, in his dissertation of

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 315 1932, refuted Brandt’s assertion and demonstrated that he had joined three separate narratives into one gripping story. The illustrator, however, suggested that the sermon was being listened to by all social classes (Blokker 2005, 1001). Following the day-to-day events in Utrecht, we read that on Saturday August twenty-fourth, the vice-burgomaster Johan Bol was asked by the Protestants to hand over two churches in the town to the adherents of the new religion. On that day Squinting Gerrit had again preached outside the Tolsteegpoort. His followers entered the town after the service. There they saw that the guildsmen who used to meet in the Geertekerk (the parish church nearest to the Tolsteegpoort) were carrying precious objects and images out of the church. Then the fat was in the re. On this Bartholomew Day some altars and images were destroyed. The next day, Sunday 25 August, a council meeting was held in the City Hall, where Dirk Kater and Jacob Cosijnz again claimed two church buildings for preaching. The frightened councillors were divided over the issue. They had no armed forces to engage in possible skirmishes and opted for delay. The Court of Utrecht and the commander of Castle Vredenburg were asked for advice. An eight-day postponement was agreed on, because bloodshed had to be avoided. The crowd of rioters who had assembled in Mariakerkhof (a square in the city) was quietened down. However, in spite of the agreement, two parish churches, the Buurkerk and the Jacobikerk, were invaded on that day. In a chronicle we can read about the Buurkerk: . . . and having entered it, all of them broke the altars and images, big and small, and the sacred sacrament house, the organs, pews and all the things that were in the church. They smashed all these to bits or threw them from the galleries. All the books in the church were ripped to shreds.1

Indeed, all the images in the Buurkerk were broken, which happened systematically. For instance, the organ was spared, contrary to what the chronicle tells us. Here the people listened to their leaders. In the Jacobikerk the goings-on were less carefully organized. 1 Ende daerinne gecommen wesende, hebben allen die aultaren ende beelden, groet ende cleyn, het heylich sacramentshuys, die organen, gestoelten ende alle datter inne was, gebroken, van boven nedergestoten, in stucken gesmeten ende allen die boecken van der kercke aen stucken gescheurt’ (Brugmans, 1904, 32).

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Then, the people moved on to two monasteries: those of the Franciscans and the Dominicans These were the two orders that were closely involved in the witch hunts of Charles V and Philip II. This time not only the minsters were damaged, but also the two libraries. The manuscripts and printed books went up in ames. In order to fan the conagration, butter and oils, consecrated or not, were poured onto the pile. On Monday, one day later, when the re was still spitting and spluttering because of the fat that had been thrown into it, two other parish churches met a similar fate: the Nicolaaskerk for the rst and the Geertekerk even for the second time. But also in these cases it became clear that some leadership was evident and not blind rage. In his apology, the nobleman Adriaan de Waal van Vronesteijn after his arrest on a charge of participation in the iconoclasm wrote: . . . and he (Adriaan) being in the same two churches, Sint Geerte and Nicolaes, managed to preserve in gentle and forceful words a great many objects in these churches that otherwise would have been smashed.2

The council sent a delegation to Brussels to ask the governess Margaretha of Parma for her opinion. On the twenty-seventh of August the magistrate gave in. The adherents of the new religion were ofcially granted the Jacobikerk, and the Dominicans and Franciscans were banned from preaching by the municipality. Reading these reports one has the impression that not only the anger because of the adoration of the images but also the possession of a particular church for a Reformed service was an objective of the iconoclasts. By destroying the images and altars they systematically tried to reach their second aim; in other words: they were killing two birds with one stone. Another element played a role as well, viz. the holiness and magic power that were attributed to the images by the clergy and, as a consequence, by the people. By destroying them it was proved that the miraculous idols were dumb and that the relics of the saints were powerless. To quote the psalmist, whose text (Psalm 115: 4–8) will undoubtedly have rung out during the conventicles as well:

2 ‘Ende heeft hij (Adriaan) in dezelve twee kercken, als Sinte Geerte ende Niclaes wesende, zoe met goede als met quaede woorden veele percheelen in de selve kercken behouden, die anders on stucken geslagen zoude hebben geworden’ (Kleijntjes, 1932, 112).

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 317 Their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. They have mouths that cannot speak, and eyes that cannot see. They have ears that cannot hear, nostrils, and cannot smell. With their hands they cannot feel, with their feet they cannot walk. No sound comes from their throats. Their makers grow to be like them, and so do all who trust in them.

When on 6 September the governess residing at Brussels, Margaretha van Parma, who had been asked to agree to the orders of the town councillors, annulled the results of the negotiations, the Protestants returned the Jacobikerk to the Roman Catholics. They started again preaching in the elds surrounding Utrecht. The way things went in Utrecht was similar to that in other towns and villages in this country, with one or two variations. The events that took place in 1566 show how in the city of Utrecht two parish churches and two monastic churches were victims of Protestant iconoclasm. Other churches and chapels were spared. From this ‘selection’ it may appear that only the parish churches which mattered to the commoners and the two churches of the religious orders most hated by the new religion fell victim to vandalism. The Domkerk (Utrecht Cathedral) In 1580 Utrecht converted to the Reformation. Rennenberg, the Groningen alderman who on March seventh 1580 suddenly defected to the Spanish army, was the immediate cause. From this, the Calvinists concluded that ‘Catholics are absolutely unreliable’. Therefore, the Utrecht militia demanded an immediate ban on the practice of Roman Catholicism. They ordered the ve Utrecht chapters to stop their meetings, all Catholics to be removed from the Provincial Council meetings, all prominent Catholics to leave the town. The councillors debated these demands. On June eighteenth the council, without consulting the ecclesiastical authorities, proclaimed a ban on practicing the Roman Catholic service. Ten days later the Provincial Council followed suit with reference to the complete Sticht (the western part of the province in those days). At the

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same time the council demanded the opening of the cathedral to the Protestants. In order to pressurize more, some images in the cathedral were broken on 18 July. One day later the chapter submitted to the ultimatum and, with heavy heart, decided to have the church purged from images. On 28 July the Calvinists moved in and on 15 August, Assumption Day, the cathedral denitively passed Protestant hands over (Struick, 1968, 142; Bruin, 2000, 213). However, on 25 August Archbishop Frederik Schenk van Toutenburg—not really a pious man—quite suddenly died at the age of 77. His burial took place in the cathedral three days later. But this burial service ended in a complete disaster. While the Latin funeral hymns resounded, the Protestants were singing their own version of the Psalms: a cacophony. In the period afterwards, the cathedral underwent ‘purication’, the sequel to the iconoclasm of 1580. It was a systematic removal of what, according to Protestants, was out of place in a church building. In 1586 the rood-loft was pulled down and much later, in 1595, what was left of the high altar. All the other Utrecht churches and chapels were now under threat, too. A lot of traces of these destructions are still noticeable. In the Chapel of Pot there used to be an altar with a stone retable. The heads of Anna, Mary, the Christ-child and God the Father above it, of Mary Magdalene, Agnes and Catharina, Martin of Tours, the Abbot Antonius and James the Elder were mutilated. The remnants of the retable were later hidden behind a thin brick wall, which was then plastered. It came to light during the restoration of the cathedral in 1919. Then a problem arose: this obviously Roman Catholic representation, despite being in pieces, did not t in a Protestant church. The solution was a curtain, which was drawn before the images during the Protestant service. At other times, however, tourists were free to see the sculptural group. Most of the bishops’ tombs are gone now, but those that are still where they used to be are badly damaged. The tomb of Guy van Avesnes, bishop of Utrecht in the early fourteenth century, is severely damaged. The head of the efgy has been slashed at and the heads of the weeping statues have all been chopped off. The tomb of bishop Jan van Arkel has been completely destroyed. But its costly bluestone was recycled. Parts of it now serve as the lower part of a choir-screen in one of the chapels of the church.

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 319 A painting representing a crucixion with Saint Margaret suffered the same fate as the Anna retable: the representation survived behind a thin brick wall. Since the discovery of the painting in 1919 a simple curtain was the way to solve the dilemma of pleasing both the churchgoer and culture devotees. The pillars of the chancel were decorated with depictions of the twelve apostles. On orders from the chapter these were taken down. The valuable tapestry as well as the canopy were preserved. Behind the high altar there was a Holy Sepulchre. It was actually a sculptured group of gures around the dead Jesus in his grave. Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus were standing at the side; the three Mary’s and John the evangelist were at the back. The grave had a liturgical function during services on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Day and Easter Monday. Moreover, we may assume it had a devotional function during the rest of the year. Of the Holy Sepulchre only a tormented image of Christ, the hands of Nicodemus and damaged ornamental gures like the guardsmen, prophets and angels remained. When in 1636—fty-six years after the iconoclasm—Pieter Saenredam was drawing the interior of the Cathedral, he saw the interior around him stripped of all the ornaments and images. Only the artefacts that could be used for the new religion, such as the pews, had been saved. Left in the background the stairs of the sacrament-house and in the middle the reverse of the Holy Sepulchre are to be seen (Schwartz, 1989, 159; 161, 163; de Groot 2000, 232–240). Although in the long run the Cathedral was stripped bare, it was still possible to desacrate it further. When the French, as part of the expansionist policy of Louis XIV (the Sun King), had conquered the city in 1672, the Cathedral was again equipped for Roman Catholic services. When, a year later, the occupying forces left the Cathedral became a Protestant place of worship again. In order to prevent that at any time in the future a high altar would be erected in the apse of the choir, a mausoleum was built for Fleet Admiral Willem van Gent. This naval hero had been killed in the Battle of Solebay in 1672. In 1676 the beautiful sepulchre sculptured by Rombout Verhulst on the initiative of the Dutch Admiralty was nished. His mortal remains were buried there in 1680 (Evers, 1935, 9–14). In a number of other Dutch churches something similar happened, in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the tomb of William of Orange, in the Jacobskerk in The Hague with the mausoleum of Admiral

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Wassenaer van Obdam, and in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, where Admiral Michiel de Ruyter has his tomb where originally the high altar had been. The Pieterskerk and the Janskerk In 1636 Pieter Saenredam also made a drawing of the Pieterskerk in Utrecht after the iconoclasm had taken place. It appears to be an empty church with a wall separating the presbytery from the nave. The painting of Saint Bernulphus (Bernold), the founder of the church, standing between the two apostles St Peter and his brother St Andrew is visible on the chancel arch. Fortunately, the depiction of the three saints has been retained. The fact that the painting representing Bernulphus has been preserved, may partly be due to the fact that the now Protestant chapter was proud of the founder of the church. Probably Bernulphus was still a local hero in their eyes. In the same year Pieter Saenredam produced a few drawings of the Utrecht Janskerk, also a collegiate church. Some of them show the northerly chapel, the Antoniuskapel, in which the canon, Dirc van Wassenaer, provost of the church, was buried in 1465. His tomb is standing against the northerly wall, his face is looking eastwards. His coat of arms is displayed on the wall. Thus the image of the canon does not only look in the direction from where the resurrected Christ will return to pass judgement on the living and the dead, but he also looks at the proud symbol of his family. In the drawing the monument is boarded up. Thanks to this boarding the mausoleum has been preserved, and is now the pride of the Janskerk. The tomb was replaced when the Antonius Chapel got a secular function. It was separated from the main body of the church, and became the chief guardhouse of the town. After the latest restoration of the church the mausoleum was so situated that Dirc is looking in a southerly direction, and can see neither the Lord passing judgement nor his own coat of arms. Who was it who boarded up the mausoleum then? His relatives? We do not know; but fortunately it was effective (Schwartz, 1989, 162, 202, 203; de Groot, 2000, 256–269). Other commemorative plaques on the walls kept the memory of deceased canons and other people alive. In stone they often showed spiritual scenes with a text written below the image. The canon e.g. is kneeling before Mary with Child, while his patron saint is recommending him.

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 321 The text below indicated who had to be commemorated and also mentioned the indulgence. Unfortunately, all the representations have perished. In most cases, however, the texts have survived and are now to be seen on the empty square consoles. Dutch seventeenth century decorated church interiors show that the buildings have been stripped of all Roman Catholic components. Furniture for the use of the Protestant service has replaced them. A case in point is an anonymous painting of a bare Romanesque village church. The minister is standing in the pulpit and the congregation is singing Psalms. The only ‘adornments’ are a board with a biblical text and one with the Ten Commandments (Dijkstra, 2002, 181). Also the Gertrudiskerk in Bergen op Zoom, as painted by Leendert Knijff (1650–1722), was adapted to Protestant services. What is still to be seen in a seventeenth century painting of this church but is missing in later portrayals, is the rood beam. Sadly, the crucix as well as the images of Mary and St John on both sides are missing, but the construction between the two crossing pillars is still there. A board with the Ten Commandments has become the new decoration of the triumphal rood beam (Dijkstra, 2002, 216). Before the Reformation, the Nieuwezijdskapel in Amsterdam was an important place of pilgrimage, the so-called ‘Heilige Stede’ (Holy Spot). It was said that the miracle of the sacred host in Amsterdam took place here. Paintings of this holy place show a chapel completely devoid of any Roman Catholic symbols and tted out for Protestant services (Dijkstra, 2002, 321, 330). To conclude this section, a contemporary quotation of a staunch Protestant is very telling: I have wished for this for twenty-ve years; it was St John who described the fall of the Whore of Babylon; I thank the Lord that I have lived so long that I can see this with my own eyes.3

Saved In the Netherlands only two mediaeval altars with sculptured retables have been preserved. One is to be found in the Sint-Jan Cathedral in

3 ‘Ik hebbe hiernaer vijfentwintich jaeren verlangt, Sint Jan heeft ons bescreven den val van de Babyloonsche hoere, ick dancke den Heere, dat ick soo langhe gheleeft hebbe om tzelve te sien’, (Kaptein, 2002, 50).

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Den Bosch. In 1629, after stadtholder Frederik Hendrik had conquered the town, the church was completely gutted and used for Reformed church services. After in 1810 the church had been returned to the Roman Catholics in Den Bosch by Louis Napoleon, a mediaeval altar was obtained in 1901. It originated from the parish church in SintAntonis, in the same province of Noord Brabant (Mees, 1985). The other altar, dating from 1510–1515, is present in the SintOswalduskerk at Zeddam, in the east of the Netherlands, close to the German border. Zeddam lies in the district called De Liemers and used to belong to the county of Bergh, with ’s-Heerenberg as its centre. The church was the property of the dean and chapter in Utrecht. When the Roman Catholic church at Zeddam was claimed by the Protestants in 1597, the altar, according to tradition, was hidden in a farmhouse. It was returned to the same church much later (Mees, 1994). Thus only two complete altars have been preserved. Of other altars, only fragments were saved. When it was impossible to take all the inventory to a safe place, some pieces could be carried away and hidden. As we saw before, the iconoclasm was announced in many places. Those who wished, saw an opportunity, or were allowed to carry their ‘property’ to safety before the house of God was puried from the deplorable idols and Catholic superstitions. One such artefact is a relief showing the adoration of the shepherds and originates from Liederholthuis, a small village near to Zwolle (van Vlierden, 2004, 211). The Holy Family in the workshop in Nazareth is a work of art made by the famous sculptor Adriaen van Wezel. It is considered to be part of the big altar which this artist produced between 1475 and 1480 for the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe Broederschap in Den Bosch, later called the Zwanenbroeders (approximately translated as: ‘The Swan Brothers’). Of this particular altar more fragments have come down to us (Van Vlierden, 2004, 194). We can also refer to many sculptured and carved scenes originating from Passion altars. The collection in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht numbers over thirty. We have no idea where they come from (Van Vlierden, 2004). The epitaph of the sisters Hadewijch van Hardenbroek († 1543) and Agnes van Gent was also secured. The panel originates from the Benedictine Abbey of Sint-Steven at Oudwijk, just outside the town walls of Utrecht. It shows a commemoration of both nuns. Relatives of one of the two deceased nuns arranged things so, that the piece was removed from the Minster. (Dijkstra, 2002, 142).

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 323 The Carthusian monastery Nieuwlicht had to be pulled down from a strategic point of view. It was situated on the river Vecht just north of the city of Utrecht.The present Laan van Chartreuse and a gatehouse on the site remind one of this convent. The altar, built by Jan van Scorel, was put to safety. On the outside panel we notice the two Carthusians who had paid for the altar kneeling before Christ on the whipping post (Defoer, 2003b, 97). After the iconoclasm, and certainly after 1580, the towns and provinces of the Dutch Republic became Protestant. Many Roman Catholic clergymen gave up and found their way to regions that had remained Roman Catholic. They took with them whatever they could. In the parish church in Raalte there used to be a ne chasuble with on the front and reverse two Y-crosses embroidered in gold thread and silk, dating from approximately 1515. The reverse shows the Empress Helena discovering the True Cross in Jerusalem. It also shows three corpses on three crosses, while on Christ’s cross the dead person is rising again. The front of the garment shows the Emperor Heraclius who in 630 triumphantly returns to the Holy City the Cross which had been robbed by the Persians under the command of King Chosroës. One wonders, how such a valuable vestment could turn up in Raalte, a relatively small town in Salland, a region of the province of Overijssel. In the Middle Ages the parish church in Raalte was dedicated to St Clement of Rome. In the seventeenth century the Stations of the Cross were called the Exaltation of the Cross. I assume that a valuable medieval chasuble, possibly with other objects connected with the Holy Cross, was smuggled out of the West of Holland, and transported across the river IJssel to Salland (Bodt 1987, 116, 182). Objects used for the divine service, such as chalices and monstrances, were also taken abroad in suitcases. We know of a number of mediaeval chalices and other liturgical objects still present (in parishes) in parishes in Belgium and Germany. These objects ended up there thanks to priests and monks who had ed. An example of this way of preservation is a chalice in Werne (Westphalia). It had been made in Utrecht in 1514 by a member of the Van Weede family, workers in precious metals, for Willem van den Bosch (or: Van Bosse). In the iconography on the base we recognize abbot Gregory, who succeeded St Boniface, and St Agnes, who had been especially worshipped in the cathedral, because it owned some of her important relics. It is plausible that the chalice came from a church or monastery in Utrecht, but we do not know which church it was. In 1650 it was in the possession of a family, who in 1622 granted it to the Capuchin Convent in Werne (Bergh-Hoogterp, 1990, 546).

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In Kalkar (G) there is a large Amsterdam monstrance of embossed silver, one yard high. It dates back to 1549 and had been made for the Oude (or: Nicolaas) Kerk. In 1578 middlemen bought this ne piece of silver at trade price from the new Protestant burgomaster. It was part of the collection from churches and monasteries which after the Reformation in Amsterdam had been brought together to be melted down. They presented the monstrance to its donor, Burgomaster Cornelis Jacobsz. Brouwer, nicknamed Bam, who had remained Roman Catholic. He brought it with him when in the same year he found refuge in Kalkar with his wide and family. In 1619 his son, Nicolaas Hendrik, bestowed it to the St Nicholas parish in Kalkar, where this ne work of art is still present (Hilger, 1990, 184). Hardly any research has as yet been done in the eld of the ecclesiastical heritage that disappeared from the Netherlands. I presume that much more Dutch art has crossed the border than we know of. However, the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the First and Second World Wars have successively taken their toll and tracks have (partly) been covered up. In most cases it is a chance hit when somebody manages to expose a sixteenth century object as being a fugitive or asylum seeker. Medieval objects made of precious metal remained almost undamaged during the iconoclasm of 1566, for example when they had been put away in a safe place. Yet, not much is left of them. In 1577 and 1578 the unconsecrated gold and silver were requisitioned by the national government as a war nd. What could not be embezzled disappeared into the melting pot (Staal, 2003, 177–178). A different historical notion In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a different historical awareness arose. Buildings were restored and objects excavated. Remnants of objects that had survived the iconoclasm were found. For example, in the city of Woerden, the remains of the fteenth century sacrament-house were found under the peat-shed north of the tower of the Reformed (or: Petrus) church in 1930. They were so numerous that reconstruction was possible. But the strictly orthodox congregation thought it improper to return it to the Petruskerk. Consequently it was walled up in the Agnietenkapel in Utrecht, in the Central Museum,

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 325 where it is still to be seen (Bouvy, 1963, 114). Remains of the sculpture group of the Holy Sepulchre from the same church were also found in 1930, and again in 1981. Some of these fragments are in possession of the Catharijneconvent in Utrecht. Others are present in the local museum in Woerden. Behind a curtain in a niche in the very same church the remaining fragments of the last nd are on display. Twenty years ago, a total reconstruction of the Holy Sepulchre in the church was still out of the question. People in Woerden were much more reticent of images than those in Utrecht (Van Vlijmen, 1982). Two images, one representing Mary and one St John, dating back to the late fteenth century used to stand beside the Holy Sepulchre, as can be seen in the cathedral in Utrecht and the church in Woerden. In the Low Countries this type of sculpture group used to be quite common. Of the exact origin of this particular group nothing is known—only that it was saved from the iconoclasm (Van Vlierden, 2004, 320). A stone head of Christ was dredged up from the bottom of the river Meuse. It is a Christ of a Holy Sepulchre. There is no conclusive proof that this head was a victim of iconoclasm (Van Vlierden, 2004, 313). In 1966 broken fragments of polychrome stone were found in the porch of the tower of the Sint-Maartenskerk in Doorn. These evidently formed part of a relief. After some puzzle work two representations appeared, which four years later were again placed in the church for which they had once been made. The damaged images were probably buried under the tower by the last priest in 1585. A triptych, with Laudes Marianae as middle panel, originates from Castle De Ham near Vleuten. Within the scope of our theme it raises some interesting questions. It is dated 1610 based on the people represented: Johan Uitenham van Wanrooy, Margaretha de Brouxelles, his wife, ve of their children, and the priest Johannes Ludolphi, the children’s teacher living in the castle. The triptych with Mary as the main theme belonged to the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwebroederschap (The Brotherhood of Our Lady), which possessed an altar in the village church of Vleuten. The church had been requisitioned and ‘purged’ on 24 April 1567. Then the brotherhood was allowed to use the private chapel of Castle De Ham, for the lord of the castle and his family had not gone over to the new religion. The triptych was made for the altar in the private chapel, which means: it was made after the iconoclasm. The question remains how to interpret the scratches across Mary’s face, clearly caused by a knife or sharp object. Apparently this altarpiece fell

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victim to vandals in the seventeenth century or later. We (still) cannot explain what exactly happened (Defoer, 2003b, 132). In 1656, during the digging up of the lower chapel in the by then Protestant Pieterskerk in Utrecht, the sarcophagus of the holy bishop Bernulphus (Bernold), was found again. In the Middle Ages he was considered a saint. Pilgrimages were made to his grave; these sporadically went on into the seventeenth century. The sarcophagus contained the bishop’s bones, the pontical garments in which he had been laid to rest and his burial gifts. These valuable presents, a small silver chalice, a small paten and a gold bishop’s ring were transferred to the Protestant chapter. But the Roman Catholics, it appeared, were most of all interested in the bishop’s mortal remains. Then something curious happened: some of the bones were kept behind by the secretary of the chapter. He allowed Catholics to worship the relics in his home. The others relics were placed in a new wooden box and returned to the sarcophagus. The interesting aspect here is that during the iconoclasm relics were violated in a variety of ways in order to prove that the relics’ cult was in fact idolatry, and, at the same time, Roman Catholics were permitted to worship them in the house of a Protestant (Leeuwenberg, 1997, 748). Back to the Utrecht Cathedral In 1923 the restoration of the Cathedral had progressed so well that it occurred to some parishioners to honour the building with a stainedglass window. The architect who supervised the restoration suggested using the large window in the south transept for this purpose and to commission the artist Richard Roland Holst (1868–1938) to carry it out. But it worked out differently, for the Hague family Loudon had ordered the well-known artist Jan Toorop to design a window for the Grote (or: Jacobs) Church in The Hague. Jan Toorop designed a window, representing Epiphany, which caused commotion in the Protestant congregation. The Hague church wardens then decided not to accept it. Next, the Loudon family presented it as a gift to the Utrecht Cathedral. The church wardens accepted it gladly, though the architect Slothouwer thought it incorrect for a Catholic artist to design a window for a Protestant church building. However, it was especially the group of parishioners who protested: an action group collected 8,329 signatures against its acceptance. A erce protest meeting in 1924 torpedoed the plan: Mary was too prominently present in the window. Toorop’s

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 327 design was never executed and his sketch ended up in the archiepiscopal museum! The commission was nally granted to Richard, the husband of the well-known Dutch socialist Henriëtte Roland Holst. He was not a— churchgoer and the Protestant pastor Couvée once subtly remarked he ‘was nothing’. Nevertheless Roland Holst designed two windows. He devoted the southern one on the right to the New Testament with the four apostles; the northern one on the left depicted the Old Testament with Moses, the lawgiver, Aaron, the priest, King David and the prophet Elijah. The southern window was nished in 1926, the northern one ten years later (Haakma Wagenaar, 1988). In 1965 Carel Kneuleman (1915) constructed a cross that was originally meant to be placed in the reconciliation church near the concentration camp Dachau. It is a broken cross, which was to be put in a corner of the church. The gure of Christ and the wood are merged into one; the right arm is disjointed from the body. The cross was displayed at the World Fair in Montreal, but never reached the place for which it was destined, because the design of another artist had been preferred. The organizers of the Dutch entry to the exhibition presented the archiepiscopal museum with the cross in 1967. Since 1986 it has been hanging on a straight wall in the remembrance chapel in the cathedral. It is an almost abstract cross that has entered the Cathedral so damaged by the iconoclasm. This time there was no problem that it was placed in a Protestant Church (Boelema, 2005, 40). In the second half of the twentieth century a part of the Protestant community in the Netherlands began to regard religious representations and rites differently. The parishioners of the ‘Nederlands Hervormde’ (Dutch Reformed) Domkerk (approximately: Cathedral) as well went along with the new views. Thus, it was possible for an object from the Catharijneconvent depot, a crucixion of 1550, sculptured by the wellknown Westphalian craftsman Johann Brabender, to be placed in one of the cathedral’s restored chapels in 1986 (Van Vlierden, 2004, 368). Today’s tourists visiting the museum are warned: this representation has not survived unscathed. However, we should rather acknowledge that this relief has lost its museological status and has ended up in the place for which it was made. Thus the situation in the Utrecht Cathedral has turned full circle; for besides this crucixion the images of the patron St Maarten of Tours and that of Agnes have meanwhile found their niches in the Cathedral as well (Van Vlierden, 2005, 3).

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Bergh-Hoogterp, L.E. van den, Goud- en zilversmeden te Utrecht in de late middeleeuwen, ’s-Gravenhage-Maarssen, 1990, 2 dln. Bodt, S.F.M. de, M.L. Caron, e.a. Schilderen met gouddraad en zijde, Utrecht, 1987. Blokker, J., e.a., Het vooroudergevoel. De vaderlandse geschiedenis met schoolplaten van J.H. Isings, Amsterdam-Antwerpen, 2005. Boelema, I, Hoekstra, F., Carel kneulman, Zwolle, 2005. Bouvy, D.P.R.A., Beeldhouwkunst Aartsbisschoppelijk Museum Utrecht, Utrecht, 1963. Bruin, R.E de (ed.), Een paradijs vol weelde. Geschiedenis van de stad Utrecht, Utrecht, 2000. Defoer, H.L.M., ‘Beelden in de Dom’, in Domkerk. Bericht van de Stichting Vrienden van de Domkerk 15 (2003), nr. 2 (= Defoer 2003 a). ———, e.a., Goddelijk geschilderd. Honderd meesterwerken van Museum Catharijneconvent, UtrechtZwolle, 2003 (= Defoer 2003 b). Dijkstra, J., Dirkse, P., Smits, A., De schilderijen van Museum Catharijneconvent, UtrechtZwolle, 2002. Evers, G.A., ‘Waarom werd Luitenant-Admiraal Van Gent in de Domkerk begraven?’, in Maandblad van Oud-Utrecht 10 (1935), 9–14. Haakma Wagenaar, T., e.a., De gebrandschilderde ramen in de Dom, Utrecht, 1988. Hilger, H.P., Stadtpfarrkirche St. Nicolai in Kalkar, Kleve, 1990. Hoekstra, T.J., De Utrechtse Pieterskerk, Utrecht, 1993 (Utrechtse Monumenten 2). Groot, A. de, ‘Beelden in de Dom van Utrecht in de zestiende eeuw’, in R. Falkenburg e.a. (ed.), Beelden in de late middeleeuwen en renaissance, Zwolle, 1994, 38–97 (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 45). ———, e.a., Pieter Saenredam, het Utrechtse werk. Schilderijen en tekeningen van de 17de-eeuwse grootmeester van het perspectief, Utrecht, 2000. Hulzen, A. van, Utrecht in 1566 en 1567, Groningen- Batavia, 1932 [diss. Utrecht]. Kleijntjens, J.C.J., Campen, J.W.C. van, ‘Bescheiden betreffende den Beeldenstorm van 1566 in de stad Utrecht’, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 53 (1932). Kootte, T., ‘Hagenpreek buiten Utrecht’, in H.L.M. Defoer, e.a. (ed.), Goddelijk geschilderd, Utrecht- Zwolle, 2003. Kaptein, H., De Beeldenstorm, Hilversum, 2002. Leeuwenberg, H., ‘Utrecht, Kapittelkerk van St. Pieter’, in P.J. Margry, C.M.A. Caspers (ed.), Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland. Dl. 1: Noord- en Midden-Nederland, AmsterdamHilversum, 1997, 748–753. Mees, H.E., Adriaanse, W.J.J., Vaart, F.J. van der, Het Lijdensaltaar in de St. Janskathedraal te ’s-Hertogenbosch, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1985. Mees, H.E., Het retabel van Zeddam. Antwerpse houtsnijkunst uit de late Middeleeuwen. Zutphen, 1994. Ruiter, P. de, ‘De glas-in-loodramen van R.N. Roland Holst in de Domkerk’, in Domkerk. Bericht van de Stichting Vrienden van de Domkerk 12 (2002), nr. 2. Schwartz, G., Bok, M.J., Pieter Saenredam. De schilder in zijn tijd, Den Haag—Maarssen, 1989. Staal, C., ‘Het bisdom Utrecht: relieken, relikwieën en reliekhouders’, H. van Os, K.R. van Kooij, C. Staal, Op weg naar de hemel. Reliekverering in de Middeleeuwen, Baarn, 2003, 163–197. Struick, J.E.A.L., Utrecht door de eeuwen heen, Utrecht, 1968. Utrechtsche Kroniek over 1566–1576. ed. H. Brugmans, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 25 (1904). Vlierden, M. van, Utrecht, een hemel op aarde, Zutphen, 1988. Vlierden, M. van, Defoer, H.L.M., Höppener-Bouvy, H.M.E., Hout- en steensculptuur van Museum Catharijneconvent, ca. 1200–1600, Utrecht-Zwolle, 2004.

17. aspects of iconoclasm in utrecht—today and in the past 329 Vlierden, Marieke van, ‘De heilige Agnes in de Domkerk’, in Bericht van de Stichting Vrienden van de Domkerk 17 (2005), nr. 2. Vliet, J. van, Ketters rond de Dom. De reformatie in Utrecht 1520–1580, Utrecht, 1987. Vlijmen, P.M.L. van, De graegging te Woerden, onderzoek naar en restauratie van de fragmenten steensculptuur uit de Petruskerk, Utrecht, 1982.

18. THE ALPHEN PIG WAR Joke Spaans (Utrecht University) Introduction In his introduction to the companion volume to the exhibition Iconoclash, Bruno Latour presents us with a video-still of a handful of men frantically hacking away at the protective casing around a religious relic. It is a picture that can be read in different ways. It looks like vandalism, but actually these are remen, trying to rescue an object of veneration from a burning cathedral (Latour, 2002, 15). He calls this picture a typical example of iconoclash, described by him as ambiguous violence against a holy image, that often seems destructive but is constructive at heart and which, in the end, often produces a new icon from the debris of the old. Much of popular culture works on the principles of iconoclash. Rebelling time and again against vested authorities, time-hallowed images, concepts and styles are taken apart, plagiarised, paraphrased, satirized, inverted, or all of the above to be reassembled into new dictates of fashion. Religion, which concerns us here, is not immune to the refashioning of its sacred truths, nor are the authoritative models of science or the established conventions of art safe from popular reinvention. Seventeenth century satirical prints on religion provide an example of this mechanism. They hold up a distorting mirror to the religious establishment, with an eye to its destruction and the emergence of new orthodoxies. A picture full of sound and fury We see the garden of a country house. Two men wearing city clothes and hats are ghting off a troop of pigs, which have overrun a third man. He lies prone at the foot of a tree that dominates the foreground. The pigghters are using garden implements, although a sword and a gun lie casually at their feet, in the company of a book, an overturned wine-mug and a clay pipe. Some pigs are resisting, but most are in

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retreat, and some have fallen, wounded and bleeding. The eeing pigs overturn some already damaged fences and a rough table with another mug, a pipe and a wine-jug. A sizeable wine-keg with a jug ready to be lled next to it suggests that some serious drinking has been interrupted. A covered horse-drawn cart is standing by at the far right side of the picture. The inhabitants of the house keep their distance; yet do have a share in the goings-on. A man leans out of one of the windows with yet another wine-jug, as if asking it to be lled towards the pigghters, who are of course too busy to notice. At the corner of the house another man, half hidden behind the tree in the foreground, res a musket at two tiny male gures in the distant meadow, behind a ock of placidly grazing sheep and against the backdrop of a church spire rising above a dense clump of trees in full summer foliage, hiding a town or village. One of the two seems to stumble and the other raises his arms as if in distress or anger.1 If the disturbing signs of deadly violence had not already alerted us, the caption of the picture and the attendant rhymed dialogue would have pointed out that we do not witness some innocent rural leisure activities. What is depicted is alternatively designated as Fratricide near Alphen or Pig War. The three drinking buddies ghting off the pigs are described as Reformed ministers, interrupted in their review of some of the controversial theological positions of their time, the second half of the seventeenth century. The dialogue suggests that they unleashed the passions, aroused in their discussions and stimulated by drink and tobacco, on some pigs innocently stumbling in, acting against the beasts as if they were the biblical Gadarene swine possessed by evil spirits. The dialogue also features the owner of the pigs, demanding compensation for the killing of some of his animals, and a tax collector who comes to collect the dues on slaughter. In the end, however, no damages are paid as a lawyer who had been drinking with the ministers, argues that all claims are legally invalid. The ministers go scot-free and will return to pasture their ocks.

1 This print is described in Muller, vol. 1, 395–396 (inv.nr. 2599), Van Rijn, vol. 3, 148–151 (inv.nr. 2612).

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A church divided But what do we see? The picture presents itself as a cartoon, in which a local incident is satirized. The incident is localized in space and time: the village of Alphen aan den Rijn, in the somewhat enigmatic ‘rst year of our Spiritual Tribulation’. Although at rst it appears to poke fun at village ministers, making fools of themselves while in their cups, the printed dialogue that accompanies the picture hints at something more serious. It suggests a local theological controversy that ts the wider context of the theologico-political situation in the last quarter if the seventeenth century. In fact, such a controversy occurred, and it had consequences that reverberated far beyond Alphen aan den Rijn.2 In 1682 one Adriaan Bouman, a Voetian minister, was appointed in Alphen in a somewhat irregular procedure. The Alphen consistory had for some years been deeply divided between Coccejans and Voetians, two opposing schools of academic theology. Both adhered to Reformed orthodoxy, but for the Voetians the focus of their theology was a defence of the truths of the confession of faith along Aristotelian lines, whereas the Coccejans experimented with newer philosophies which stimulated innovative biblical exegesis. Coccejans were divided over the application of Cartesian philosophy to theological questions. The lively academic disputes that this produced were relatively harmless in themselves. Political patronage for one or the other theological school could, however, draw the Reformed church into the omnipresent factionalism of the time, and exacerbate it in turn—which was what happened in the reign of stadtholder William III. The invasion of the Republic by France, England, Munster and Cologne in 1672 had led to the elevation of Prince William III of Orange to the position of stadtholder. From 1674 he consolidated the power won by his brilliant military successes with the help of the Voetian party in the public Church. Their support, strengthened by his favour and patronage, helped him break the power of the regents of the previous stadtholderless regime, who by and large favoured the Coccejan school. Throughout the Republic, these were years of unprecedented and bitter polarization, both in politics and in the Church, in villages like Alphen as well as in the big cities (Israel 1995, 807–815). 2 All this is work in progress. The following touches upon the highlights only. So far the extent of the conict was unknown. Cf. Plemper, 1714, 261; Regt, 1932, 74–75.

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After 1672 the election of ministers became a highly contested issue in Alphen. Twice the Coccejans won a narrow victory over the Voetians. With the appointment of Bouman in 1682 the tables were turned, not, it appears, without intense machinations on both sides. In this matter, the Voetians had the support of the ambachtsheer, the local lord. This gentleman was a Catholic, but under the Dutch constitution enjoyed the right to approve or veto the choice of the consistory in the appointment of Reformed ministers for his village. Catholics and dissenters in general looked upon the stadtholders from the House of Orange as the protectors of their interest against the regent party. Consequently, the ambachtsheer was a bulwark of support for the Voetian party in Alphen and for its minister.3 Soon after his appointment the reverend Bouman became embroiled in scandal over his personal conduct. It was said he spread slanderous rumours about an adulterous affair between the wife of the sheriff and the physician Bilderbeek. Ladies who came to pay Bouman’s wife a lying-in visit at his house had their caps pulled off by him and thrown into the re. He had been involved in drunken brawls. Also, it had become known that in his nal examination before he could be ordained, his knowledge of Scripture had been found wanting. He had passed nonetheless, presumably as a result of some form of favouritism, but had been admonished to humility and further study. In a previous posting he had had an altercation with a Coccejan candidate for the ministry, one Cornelis Lens. He had accused Lens of unorthodoxy, but had been compelled by ecclesiastical authorities to apologize. This enforced humiliation obviously rankled, for in Alphen he had named his dog Cornelis Lens, and had taught it some ‘Coccejan tricks’. All of this was considered conduct unbecoming in a minister.4 Worse, his pastoral style appears to have fallen short of the standards set by his predecessors. These had preached not only on Sundays, but also every Wednesday. This was unusual in a village church. The local elite had cherished this preaching schedule, which had raised

3 For the appointments see Streekarchief Rijnlands Midden (= SARM) Alphen aan den Rijn, Archives Dutch Reformed Church: Minutes of the Alphen consistory, cat. nr. 156; National Archives (= NA), The Hague, Archives Classis Woerden en Overrijnland: Resolutions classis, cat. nr. 10; Minutes of deputies of the classis, cat. nr. 28; Register of appointments, cat. nr. 31; Index synodal resolutions, cat. nr. 49. For general histories of Alphen cf. Hedendaagsche historie, 1746 (vol. 16). More recent: Dinkelaar e.a., 1988; specically on wartime conditions: Van Es, 2004, 50–62. 4 NA, Archive Hof van Holland: Criminal papers, cat. nr. 5343.10 (1685).

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their village church a notch above the surrounding parishes, and had given Alphen’s church life a quasi-urban distinction.5 Churchwardens had consented to pay their minister an extra allowance in recognition of his efforts. Bouman, however, preached the customary weekday sermons only during the winter season, and had dropped them during the summer months. Ary van Loendersloot, one of the Alphen churchwardens, and in this capacity responsible for the nances of the church, suspected that Bouman had committed fraud with his letter of appointment. He was understandably annoyed that Bouman claimed the allowance, but refused to deliver the goods and preach the weekday sermons all year round, diminishing the standing of the church of Alphen. When the consistory ignored his complaints, Van Loendersloot had publicly accused him of dereliction of duty, and openly called him a crook. Bouman hit back viciously, high-handedly citing him before the bailiff of Rijnland, who had Van Loendersloot convicted for slander. One of the judges in this case was an alderman of Alphen, and member of the Voetian party that backed the minister. Van Loendersloot had to make his apologies to Bouman, formally and publicly, and was moreover ned the hefty sum of 1000 guilders, to be paid into the village poor fund. Bouman gloated over this triumph of his party and the humiliation of his opponent.6 The pigs attack The churchwarden did not leave it at this. He was unable to prove his allegations, not having access to the original letter of appointment, which was in Bouman’s keeping, or to the minutes of the classis, or regional ecclesiastical board of Woerden and Midden-Rijnland, that had issued the letter. Oral testimony from elders and deacons who had been involved in Bouman’s call to Alphen convinced him of the truth of his suspicions. They were, moreover, shared by his successor in ofce and others in the congregation, who brought their grievances before the consistory. The minister denied their allegations, and the elders and deacons closed ranks with him. Early in 1685 they excluded the

5 The ‘urban’ pretensions of Alphen are nicely illustrated by the publication of Plemper’s Beschryving, which ts the Renaissance genre of laudatory urban histories. 6 NA, Archive Hof van Holland: Criminal papers, cat. nr. 5343.10 (1686).

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malcontents from partaking in the Lord’s Supper. The consistory was by now rmly under Voetian control. Together with the sheriff, Dirk Roosenboom, and the village council they constituted a formidable power base for Bouman in Alphen. The malcontent members, however, appealed to the classis Woerden. In the Dutch Reformed Church the classis functioned as regional ecclesiastical court of appeal. Formally the classis was not authorized to hear an appeal before the local consistory had rst given a verdict, which the Alphen consistory refused to do. They considered the malcontents merely obstinate, and kept their case pending, expecting them to give up sooner or later and reconcile themselves with Bouman. In this case, however, the classis saw reasons to intervene. And over this point of ecclesiastical law matters spun out of hand. The malcontent church members found support with the classis, but the minister and the consistory, with the tacit support of the local magistrate and the ambachtsheer, enlisted the legal aid of the Provincial Court of Justice (Hof van Holland ) to deny the authority of the classis as long as the consistory had not given a verdict. The classis, however, considered the matter of the alleged forgery of the letter of appointment a purely ecclesiastical matter, on which an investigation was denitely in order. An attorney, one George Roosenboom, one of a tribe of Roosenbooms in the legal profession, was hired to represent both the classis and the malcontents. He pleaded their case before the Provincial Court, and obtained permission for an ofcial investigation into the terms of Bouman’s contract, as long as this fell short of formal censure of the minister.7 On July 6th, 1685, deputies from the classis came to the village to inquire about the rumoured discrepancies between the versions of Bouman’s letter of appointment in the original letter, the copy in the consistory records and its registration in their own administration. At this occasion the festering conict spectacularly erupted. The minister tergiversated, claiming to have lent the letter of appointment to the sheriff, who had taken it with him to The Hague. His condescending attitude only increased the deputies’ annoyance with his lack of cooperation. When they found their usefulness and their patience at an end, and made ready to depart, however, they found their exit barred

7 NA, Archive Classis Woerden en Overrijnland: Resolutions classis, cat nr. 10, p. 171 (3 juni 1685), NA, Archive Hof van Holland: Criminal papers, cat. nr. 5341.19 (1685).

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and themselves physically threatened by an angry mob supporting the minister. The people ordered them to hand over the minutes of their meeting, which contained the charges against the minister, and when these turned out not to be to their liking, dictated others, forcing the secretary to rewrite several times. The deputies were glad to escape unharmed.8 All this was manifestly a case of riot and sedition, and a week later, on July 13, at half past ve in the morning, a heavy delegation from the Provincial Court, assisted by the Attorney General, left The Hague by coach to investigate. By nine o’clock the men installed themselves in a local tavern to hear witnesses. They were very thorough. The deputies of the classis, who were ministers of the established church, and thus public ofcials, had been verbally abused and physically threatened while on an ofcial mission for the ecclesiastical authorities. The villagers had taken the law into their own hands. Worse, Bouman had been their accomplice. Not only had he obstructed the lawful investigations of the deputies, villagers also attested that he and the village magistrates had orchestrated the whole thing, inciting the crowd to go and raise hell in the church. Afterwards a celebration party had been held on the porch of Bouman’s house, at which the minutes wrung from the deputies’ secretary had been read. The minister had treated all comers to wine. Parties spent the rest of the year 1685 and most of 1686 producing and investigating evidence. The Provincial Court heard more witnesses and interrogated suspects. By October 1685 the classis had managed to get all the requisite documentation, and it convened in full session nally to establish the truth or untruth of Bouman’s alleged forgery. Bouman, present as a full member of the classis, fumed at this and again threatened legal action, but he was forced to leave the room while the classis discussed his case. Finally the classis noted the differences between the two copies of Bouman’s contract, which proved to be small but signicant, concerning the contested issue of the weekday sermons. In his original contract it was stated as his duty to deliver the weekday sermons ‘faithfully, in accordance with the custom of his predecessors in ofce’. Apparently Bouman had left out this clause, thus changing

8 NA, Archive classis Woerden en Overrijnland: Minutes of deputies of the classis, cat. nr. 28, pp. 143–145 (9 juli 1685); Archive Hof van Holland: Criminal Papers, cat. nr. 5341.5 (1685), cat. nr. 5343.10 (1686).

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the meaning of the original letter and creating a loophole for dropping the weekday sermons in summer. The classis recorded the differences in its minutes, but could not take the matter any further under the restrictions set by the Provincial Court.9 Meanwhile discontent smouldered on in the congregation of Alphen. Throughout 1686 isolated complaints from church members, who found themselves passed over in the house-visitations preceding the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, reached the classis, but were relegated to the consistory.10 By the end of the year, in the streets of Alphen the troubles had again reached the point of riot. On the 7th of October, during the annual fair of nearby Hazerswoude, in an Alphen tavern a ‘vile ditty’ was sung, in which several prominent persons were held up for ridicule. Among the singers were some of the persons the Provincial Court held to be instigators of the riot in the church of Alphen in the summer of the previous year, and the main target of criticism was yet another Roosenboom, a councillor of the Provincial Court. This councillor is hard to identify, but must have been one of three brothers Roosenboom who held high ofces in the Provincial Court, the Supreme Court and the administration of the province of Holland in general. At least one of them was a very close condant of stadtholder William III (Hora Siccama, 1915, 592–594). The ‘ditty’ sung at the Hazerswoude fair suggested that this Roosenboom had incited the lynching of Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother by a mob on the so-called Green Sod in The Hague in 1672. This was an area politically so sensitive, that none of the authorities wanted to go there. Early November four of the singers: two aldermen, a master shipbuilder and the maid of the Alphen sheriff, were arrested, late at night. They were put in custody in The Hague, to be released on bail after a month. During their incarceration the reverend Bouman was also cited before the Provincial Court. The formal proceedings would drag all through the rst half of 1687.11 All this did not end the unrest in Alphen. Discord brewed in gatherings on street corners and in taverns. People called each other names, 9 NA, Archive Classis Woerden and Overrijnland: Resolutions classis, inv. nr. 10, p. 185–187 (Oct. 9, 1685). 10 NA, Archive Classis Woerden and Overrijnland: Resolutions classis, inv. nr. 10, p. 196, 204, 209 (April 16, June 24, October 1st, 1686). 11 NA, Archives Hof van Holland: Calendar of hearings in criminal cases, cat. nr. 5812 (February 18 and 25, March 12 and 20, April 8 and 15, June 3 and 10 1687); Criminal papers, cat. nr. 5349.28 (1688), cat. nr. 5353.19 (1689).

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spread malicious rumours and also incited their children to harass those of the other party by following them on the streets, shouting insults and taunting them with satirical songs. The Provincial Court issued an order to end all public disturbances or face the penalties for libel and public disorder, and had it signed by its president, stadtholder William III himself.12 Meanwhile Bouman and his associates in the consistory visited those ex-members of the consistory who had testied before the commissioners of the Provincial Court, and tried to manipulate them into retracting their testimony. They used a mixture of sweet-tongued pleading for a return to harmony and outright bullying. One of these men was plied with spiked wine into such a drunken stupor that afterwards he did not know whether or not he had given in.13 The Attorney General was not impressed by Bouman’s defence. The minister was charged with forgery in the case of this letter of appointment, of obstruction of proper ecclesiastical procedure and incitement to riot. The sentence demanded was suspension from ofce, exclusion from any public ofce or service in Holland, Zeeland and West-Friesland for life, a heavy ne and payment of all the legal costs made in his case.14 The bitterness of the strife over these years was such that it produced contradicting testimonies, and is hard to determine to what extent Bouman was responsible. It is quite possible, as the Attorney General himself noted, that the Voetians in the consistory and the magistrate had wanted their Voetian candidate so badly that they were prepared to forego the weekday sermons and pay Bouman the extra allowance nonetheless, and that there had indeed been some form of contract to that effect to which the lord of Alphen had given his consent. Neither the consistory records, nor those of the classis, however, contained any proof that competent church authorities had approved of this agreement, and those who had been in ofce at the time of his installation in Alphen unanimously denied any knowledge of such an approval. It may well be that the minister had so much trusted the power of his political patrons, that he had considered himself exempt from the observance of formal ecclesiastical procedure. In the spirit of the Latin

12 NA, Archives Hof van Holland: Resolutions, inv. nr. 98, pp. 249–250 (Nov. 29, 1686, to be published in Alphen Dec. 1st, 1686). Printed as a y-leaf, headed Waerschouwinge, in Knuttel, 12534. 13 NA, Archives Hof van Holland: Criminal papers, cat. nr. 5353.13 (1689). 14 NA, Archive Hof van Holland: Criminal Papers, cat. nr. 5343.10 (1686).

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adage stultibus non succurritur—or: the law does not condone stupidity, the Attorney General considered this question irrelevant. A large number of malcontent church members now asked the classis to suspend Bouman from ofce pending the trial. This was a request so manifestly justied, that the consistory and its supporters in the local magistracy and in the manor had to look for help from the highest quarters available to them. They managed to obtain a writ from the Supreme Court (Hoge Raad ), denying the Provincial Court jurisdiction over a matter that had not rst been adjudicated by the local consistory.15 Consequently the Supreme Court and the Provincial Court became embroiled in a highly complicated and emotionally charged dispute over precedence. This was something utterly unheard of, and for which the instructions of the Courts did not provide—in short an impossible problem for the highest echelon of the judicial system, and all that over the duties of a village minister. Of course these were not in itself the cause of this clash of jurisdictions. The whole conict turned around factional strife between a Voetian-Orangist and a Coccejan-anti-Orangist faction, in the Republic at large. Already before the appointment of Bouman in 1682, however, stadtholder William III had abandoned his earlier exclusive support for the Voetians. From the late 1670s onwards he strove to balance the theologico-political blocs. In 1687 he was already contemplating the invasion of England for which he needed support from a united country. The appeals of the opposing factions in the conict at Alphen to the high courts of justice pitted against each other the Provincial Court, presided over by the stadtholder himself, and the Supreme Court, apparently dominated at this point by councillors from Amsterdam, a city that habitually opposed the stadtholder, creating a new opposition. Stadtholder William III of Orange himself now personally stepped in to pacify the situation. He effectively ordered all parties to back off, forget their claims and destroy all their les. These high-handed orders may well have been the only way to cut through this unwholesome knot and save face all around. Nobody was to be held accountable, and the contesting parties were left to themselves, to lick their wounds and somehow bear with each other. 15 NA, Archive classis Woerden en Overrijnland: Resolutions classis, cat. nr. 10, pp. 219–228 (4 and 26 March 1687). The requests and writs are mentioned here, but the classis was forbidden under the previous court order to insert the actual texts of these documents.

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The order to destroy the files was only partially obeyed. Local records that could be expected to shed light on the root of this conict are either very scanty or altogether missing. In the records of consistory and classis in some cases obviously nothing was recorded in the rst place, in others documents have not been inserted or have been deliberately destroyed. The Provincial Court retained some of its les, if only because Bouman and his associates tried during the next few years, to clear their names. These are, however, in considerable disarray and dispersed over several portfolios. Some documents that according to inventories have survived, have not been found (yet). The clash between the two high courts of justice caused a considerable stir. The periodical Hollandtsche Mercurius published a lengthy report, extensively spelling out the legal complications and publishing extracts from the correspondence between the parties involved. At the same time it kept piously silent on the original cause that had provoked all this. The press thus strictly obeyed the injunctions of the stadtholder.16 The producer of our print did not. He published his views on the troubles in Alphen, but to evade censorship he did so anonymously. He moreover veiled his message in dense metaphor, both in the pictorial language of the print and in the accompanying text. And he was not the only one to do so. Adriaan Bouman’s case provoked poems that circulated in manuscript, and a pamphlet—all of them anonymous and ‘encrypted’, their meaning accessible only to those ‘in the know’. Unlike the Hollandtsche Mercurius, they did not treat what had happened in Alphen as an item of news, as history, but as a moral lesson, a subject for contemplation. They chose satirical print, prose and poetry as their medium—genres which were well developed in seventeenth-century Dutch culture. The root of the problem Let us look at the satirical poems rst, as they provide one of the keys to connect the print of the ‘Alphen pig war’ to the case of Adriaan Bouman and the collision between the two courts of law. I have found two, one in Dutch and one in Latin. The Dutch poem is named Varckemoort, or ‘The Murder of the Pigs’. Couplets in which the spirits of dead pigs lament their murder alternate with rhymed ‘responses’ that suggest that

16

Hollandtsche Mercurius (1687), pp. 162–171.

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their death was caused by factional strife over an appointment. The murder is blamed on theologians who had been drinking, conspiring to get their candidate appointed and discussing an anti-Socinian book written by one of them. This heady mixture had incited the plotters to kill the poor pigs on sight, which in turn had led to an altercation with a clerk over the meat excise. No mention at all is made of Alphen. The poem claims to be printed ‘next to the Chapel, under the Rosetree’. In the end the pigs ask for memorial masses for their souls, but the ‘responses’ make it clear that the chances they will obtain their request are slight.17 The Latin poem bears the title Pugna concionatorum quorundam cum porcis. It has essentially the same story line, but in a less ‘spiritist’ vein, as it does not feature the spirits of the dead pigs or their plea for memorial masses.18 The poems evidently speak the same language as our print, and refer to the same facts. The only obvious connection of the poems to Alphen, however, is the similarity in imagery. When the Dutch poem locates the murder of the pigs ‘next to the Chapel’, this may refer to the fact that the Catholic ambachtsheer of Alphen, who protected the minister, maintained a chapel in his manor, which may have been the place of worship of Catholics from Alphen and its surrounding countryside—we know his heirs made the chapel available to Catholic parishioners (Regt, 1932, 53). The adjacent ‘Rose-tree’ could be a pun on the names of the Alphen notary and sheriff Dirck Roosenboom or the eponymous councillor in the Provincial Court who was so cruelly mocked in a slanderous ditty. Remarkably both poems are dated 1674. The Dutch poem elaborates on this date and claims to be written ‘In’t worteljaer 1674’, which translates as ‘in the year of the root’, or ‘of the carrot’. This is problematic, as the poems and the print must refer to the problems surrounding Adriaan Bouman, which started with his appointment in 1682 and came to such a spectacular head in the clash between the two high 17 ‘Varckemoort. Of de Dwalende, Clagende Varckens-geesten over haer ontydige Doodt. Met de antwoorden van die geene, aan wien sij haere clachten sijn offererende. Gedruckt in ’t worteljaer 1674 met kwibbelige letters naest de Capel, onder de Roseboom’. In: Van Rijn,vol. 3, 149–151. 18 Handwritten on the copy of the pamphlet Missive aen een seker Heer N.N. Inhoudende een verantwoordinge voor de eere van eenige Personen wegens een versierden Verken-strijt op een dorp by Alphen, no place, no date, in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague under shelfnr. Knuttel 11255.

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courts in 1687. The print does not bear a date, except for the enigmatic ‘rst year of the new Spiritual Tribulation’. If we take all these mystications around the date of the Alphen Pig War together, we get a ‘root year 1674’. The year 1674 could be taken as the starting point of a development that ended in the standoff between the Provincial Court and the Supreme Court in 1687, and of a nation-wide ‘Spiritual Tribulation’. In 1674 stadtholder William III started his ruthless exploitation of factional divisions among the regent class. His policy of favouring the Voetian faction in the Reformed Church led to deep divisions in the public Church as a whole. His power play was at the root of the development that brought to his pulpit the minister whose alleged criminal conduct had caused such mayhem in the judicial system of Holland. If the policies of stadtholder William III were thus seen as underlying the Pig War, then designating 1674 as the year of the root—or the carrot—does make sense, and the vividly orange colour of carrots reinforces the pun. The signicance of the picture Against this background it is now possible to read our picture. The pigs stand for the malcontents in the Alphen congregation. They attack their minister, and are fought off by his powerful friends in the consistory, the magistrate and the manor. The minister falls on his face, but is basically unharmed. The congregation suffers, just like the pigs that bleed and die. Church members should not act like these pigs, and should not attack their minister. They ought to be like the placid sheep, peacefully grazing. But for that sheep need a shepherd, who leads and protects them. Bad shepherds risk being overrun by pigs. Sheep and pigs can be taken as either both faces of the congregation, or as representations of supporters and opponents of the minister. A minister who is not a pastor, but who foments division in his congregation, allows evil spirits to wreak havoc in his ock, like the evil spirits that possessed the Gadarene swine of the Gospel. The covered horse-drawn cart reinforces the image of ecclesiastical conict. It is a nightsoil cart, and gures repeatedly on prints referring to theological conicts, notably the Arminian Troubles during the Twelve Year Truce (1609–1621), where it carries off the defeated Arminians to the dunghill of history. Here it stands ready to perform the same service to whoever will lose this Pig War.

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The battle takes place in the garden of a country manor, referring to the role the ambachtsheer played in the background. The powerful friends use garden implements against the pigs, not the weapons that properly belong to the maintenance of order: the sword and the gun. The gun is used, with deadly accuracy, in internecine strife. The minister’s powerful friends, the Alphen magistrate and consistory, and their supporters in the Supreme Court, attack the classis and the Provincial Court. The latter are the tiny gures in the background, the men who come running across the eld, to rescue the pigs. The troubles in Alphen were not just a Pig War, that is a rising of a congregation against those placed in authority above them, but rst and foremost a Fratricide. The authorities, in using instruments of aggression not t for the purpose of keeping order, in trying to suppress proper ecclesiastical procedures in church conicts by a creative use of the law, end up ghting each other. The tree in the foreground has a curious rosette halfway up the trunk. It is a rose-tree, or in Dutch: a Roosenboom, the name of several of the lawyers involved in the legal wrangles. The rose-tree then may symbolize the due process of law, which should uphold and protect proper authority and order. In the Alphen case, the law neither protected the minister nor his ock, but was used as a cover for internecine strife between authorities—it half hides the man with the musket. In the end nobody wins: the table in the garden, where people should seek each other’s company, drink, smoke and talk shop, and in the case of well-educated people, should amicably resolve the urgent problems of their times, is overturned (Cf. Bergsma, 2004, 96–121). The sting of the picture is in the sword that lies at the foot of the tree, unused. Unlike the gun, which is the weapon of the soldier under orders, the sword is the emblem of those giving the orders, the nobility and ultimately the sovereign. The stadtholder had made an end to the crisis caused by the Alphen troubles, and order had been restored, but had the sword of authority really solved the problems underlying this crisis, was it used to full effect? As the accompanying text and the poems indicate: the Pig War had ended in slaughter of the pigs, or disruption in the community, but nobody had been made to pay for the damage. No meat excise was paid, and no memorial masses were sung. The minister, whose lack of respect for ecclesiastical ordinances had been the cause of dissension, could keep his position, with the support of the authorities. The congregation had to learn to live with its divisions. Factional division itself was not resolved.

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The Alphen Pig War has to be read against the backdrop of the religio-political policies of stadtholder William III. By the mid-1680s he had changed his strategy. Instead of favouring the Voetian bloc, he forced the opposing factions to share power. In this way strife had everywhere been contained by strictly regulating their venues of power and inuence, both in civil government and in the Church, through formal agreements towards equal representation of both factions in the so-called contracten van correspondentie (Israel, 1995, 837–840). Politically this worked, but the question remained whether religious divisions, which were part and parcel of the new political regime, could not again arouse passions that in turn could upset this arrangement. Should one leave the theologians a free rein in theological school-formation, with its potentially divisive political consequences, or should they be limited strictly to their place in a well-ordered Republic: pasturing their ocks within the boundaries set by confession and ecclesiastical ordinances, which were in turn maintained by the power of the State? In the Alphen Pig War the minister had been allowed to become part of the leading political faction of his village, and the staunch support of the political elite had impeded the correction of his alleged abuses of ofce through ecclesiastical channels. This disregard of the separation between ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions, and the resulting clash of authorities, had escalated beyond all measure and threatened the proper working of the judicial system at the highest level. At an earlier occasion the stadtholder had acted more decisively: when in 1676 the politically inspired appointment of a Coccejan minister in Middelburg, against the wishes of the church, had led to violent disturbance, he had personally intervened, dismissed the minister and purged the magistrate (Israel, 1995, 819–820; Van der Bijl, 25–26). This was still part of his initial strategy of breaking the Coccejan ascendancy. In the 1680s he strove for balance between the Coccejans and the Voetians, and had denied both Alphen factions a victory. Parties had been ordered to ignore their grievances, and peace had been enforced. But the evil spirits that had taken possession of the Alphen pigs—were they also exorcised, or were they left to wreak further havoc?

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joke spaans Riddles within riddles

The picture can be made to yield its meaning, but only by breaking through thick layers of allusion and metaphor. It is like a greased pig, hard to get a grip on. Its meaning can be seen only by those who already know in considerable detail what the picture refers to. The only element that ties it to the commotion around the minister of Alphen is the toponym in the caption of the print. The printed dialogue is as enigmatic as the print itself. The poems that circulated in manuscript bore the date 1674, which pointed away from the time of the event, and were an enigma in themselves. This obfuscation was itself the subject of a pamphlet that must have appeared around this same time as the print. It adds another layer of mystication, while posing as an explanation to the riddle of the Pig War. It is, of course, also anonymous, and no date or place of publication is given. The pamphlet refers to poems, both in Dutch and in Latin, and engraved prints, that satirized ministers and other honourable persons as if they were drunkards, slanderers and prone to unrestrained attacks on innocent pigs. The author claims to have been present at the occasion described in these poems and prints, and that nothing untoward had happened at all. A minister had invited some guests for a decent meal, which had been interrupted by pigs breaking into his garden. Some of the guests had tried to shy the beasts away with their linen napkins. As this did not have the desired effect, one had taken an innocuous gardening tool, and had tried to push the pigs away with the wooden handle. One of the pigs inadvertently got hit on the nose and died of fright, another had been slightly wounded in the leg, and that really was all that had happened. The author then rails at slanderous folk, who would stop at nothing to rob distinguished persons of their honour. The libellous texts and prints have distorted the time, the persons involved and the facts. The anonymous author is entirely right here, as the persons and the facts are an allegorization. As has been indicated above, the dating of poems and print is ctitious. According to the pamphlet, however, the time is erroneously given as Whitsuntide (the text accompanying our picture mentions ‘een heylige Pinxter’ ), which, on the contrary, does have a basis in fact, as the nal showdown between Provincial Court and Supreme Court was scheduled for that day. The author thus shows that he is entirely familiar with what happened in Alphen. This pamphlet appears to be a curious mixture of truth and ction, defending the

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literal truth of what is evidently a metaphor, and presenting truths as if they were evident lies. However, having come this far, do we really grasp the signicance of the entire affair? Some ramications remain wholly obscure. It is clear that the ambachtsheer of Alphen was involved, but he seems to hide entirely behind his sheriff Dirck Roosenboom. The latter’s maid was charged with her involvement in the riot in the church and the slander of councillor Roosenboom of the Provincial Court, but the question whether the maid acted with her employer’s consent or against his wishes never came up. Councillor Roosenboom of the Provincial Court, who was slandered in the ditty sung by Bouman’s ercest supporters, does not even have a rst name. The Attorney General suspected that this man was involved in the shady negotiations that took place, previous to Bouman’s installation in Alphen, between the minister, the village magistrates and the lord, by which Bouman was to be allotted the supplement to his salary while being relieved from the weekday sermons during the summer season, for which the supplement had been given to his predecessors in ofce. The Attorney General noted, however, that, even in the interrogations of Bouman, Roosenboom’s name was never mentioned. Apparently the involvement of these high-placed persons was strictly off limits. The literally had to be kept out of the picture. To preserve their honour inviolate, they were untouchable by all public media, be it pamphlet, poem, emblem or print. The root of the problem was left alone. The Provincial Court, which from the beginning of the affair had supported the Orangist faction in Alphen, in the end, prosecuted its hottest heads. This does not mean it changed allegiances. It consistently upheld the status quo. At rst it maintained the authority of the consistory against the pretensions of the classis by a strict interpretation of ecclesiastical procedure. After the riot in the church it called to account those who, in an overestimation of the extent to which their political patrons were prepared to cover their actions, had perturbed the public peace and, perhaps even more importantly, had dared to attack or pervert vested authority, political and ecclesiastical. Iconoclash What we have here is a satirical print on a theologico-political conict. It shows a violent scene. Supercially we see the disruption of academic

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theological discussion by the uninitiated, depicted as pigs. Beneath the surface we nd far deeper layers of signicance, all equally violent, involving personal animosities, factionalism in a local community, and nationwide political and ecclesiastical strife, against the backdrop of international conict. The print itself attacks the religio-political status quo, and seems to advocate a new equilibrium, in which the ‘spiritual tribulation’ can be laid to rest. It is bent on destruction in a constructive way, but also very circumspectly, and its deeper meaning is even formally denied in a pamphlet (Cf. Latour, 2002, 17). Satirical prints were not exactly rare in the Dutch Golden Age, nor were satirical pamphlets or poetry. Ofcial censorship enforced certain prohibitions, however. It was ofcially forbidden to publish slander, in any way. Placards to this effect were regularly renewed, and from 1686 included cartoons as well as written publications (Weekhout, 1998, 84–86). This legislation alone testies to a lively production, and the museum collections of historical prints contain many examples. Satirical prints on vested authorities were, however, very sensitive, and representations of religion or the Church are especially rare for the later seventeenth century. The Reformation in the sixteenth century spawned a ood of satirical prints, and quite a number appeared concerning the Arminian controversies. The later seventeenth century also witnessed serious conicts, both doctrinal and ecclesiological, in all of the major confessions, which have elicited ample comment in polemical and satirical pamphlets, but have left no comparable pictorial record. We do have pictures of church buildings, especially the public churches, both exterior and interior views. We have biblical scenes and, in the Catholic sphere, saints. We have portraits of clergymen, galore. Books for ecclesiastical or devotional use, or treating religious subjects in some other way, often show allegories on religion or the Church, personied on their title pages, as a modestly dressed woman, sitting on a rock, embracing the foot of the Cross, holding an open Bible, an anchor at her feet, hovering doves, with trampled demons or beams of light as optional extras. In short, what we have are pictures underpinning normative religion, showing the authorized places of worship, the clerical gures of authority, religious heroes and the personication of what religion ought to be. This is even true of the cartoons on the Arminian controversies. It has been demonstrated that all of these appeared after the Arminian faction had been defeated and ofcially condemned. These cartoons thus functioned as a public conrmation of the Counter-remonstrants’ victory (Israel, 1995, 439).

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Recently we have seen that, to the present day, the immediacy of images makes them far more sensitive than the printed word. Cartoons, by their very ambiguity, are easily manipulated.19 In the so-called confessional age formidable obstacles had to be overcome before authoritative religion, or any authority, could be criticized in pictures. The monopoly and prerogatives of the established religion were maintained by the power of the state. Contradiction of the tenets of the established church, whether in its doctrine or ecclesiastical ordinances, was a punishable offence. Even in the Dutch Republic censorship repressed open criticism of the public church. Only qualied theologians, those who were appointed to teach at a university and ordained ministers, were authorized to discuss theological matters. Professors had some measure of academic freedom, but ministers were held to remain within the limits set by the confession of their church, and for everything they published they had to obtain the approbation of their classis. The faithful were allowed and even stimulated to study the foundations of their faith in Scripture, but only with the help of approved literature and preferably under the supervision of an ordained minister or a lay teacher who was authorized by the consistory. The latter was only allowed to explain the catechism or some other approved theological primer, but could not expound Scripture or doctrine. Difcult questions had to be relegated to a minister. Both contradiction from outsiders and free discussion among insiders were thus severely limited. Pamphlets did comment on theological controversies, despite these limitations, but unqualied authors could only publish their views anonymously—and pamphlets were rarely illustrated (Van Rooden, 2001, 125–151). Not only did the conditions of the confessional state leave little room for prints satirizing aspects of the established church. In fact, even cartoons on tolerated churches are rare. The print on the Alphen Pig War belongs to a little cluster of satirical-moralistic images, published in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and probably originating in the circles of the ‘radical enlightenment’.20 They illustrate contemporary perceptions of ‘what religion should be’—and what it was in practice. Their content is not unlike some of the pamphlets, emblemata, poems, novels or commemorative

19 At the end of January 2006 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published the previous year in a Danish newspaper caused violent indignation worldwide. 20 As described and analysed in Israel, 2001.

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medals published on the same issues. These emblemata always combined a picture with a poem. The picture was usually a variation on a wellknown image, and in combination with the text it presented a moral conundrum on personal conduct (often in matters of love), piety and social ethics. They were highly valued among the literate as intellectual riddles and conversation pieces (Cf. de Jongh, 1995). Our picture, with its allusion to the biblical story of the Gadarene swine, ts this format, and is to be taken as an emblem, rather than as a cartoon in the modern sense. It is an indictment of the way religion had proved able to embarrass and upset political authority, and thereby order—an abuse of religion the Enlightenment would come to designate as ‘fanaticism’. The print was not designed for a broadly popular audience, but for an erudite lay audience. It’s meaning was skilfully hidden, so that only those with inside knowledge would get its message. It offers food for thought, invites contemplation of an enigma, in the learned emblematic tradition that was fully developed and richly ourishing in the Dutch Golden Age. It presents its viewers with a riddle. How is the sword at the foot of the tree to be used? It suggests that the sovereign was entitled, even morally compelled to intervene in matters theological to prevent a crisis like the Alphen Pig War. It confronts the viewer with conicting images of peace and conict, of order and disorder, of clerical fanaticism and the duties of enlightened sovereigns. If it were published in 1687, it would thus question the religious policies of an autocratically inclined stadtholder and the proper chains of command at the highest levels of the complicated decentralized structure of the Dutch Republic. These were not subjects considered t for public discussion and certainly not for popular prints. It could also have been published somewhat later, after stadtholder William III had come to the throne of England and had shifted the focus of his attention to the wider European balance of power, as a comment on the 1694 resolution by the States of Holland ‘towards the peace of the Church’.21 The States made this resolution at a moment when again theological controversies threatened to trigger political crisis. It strictly limited theologians in their public teaching to the essentials of the Reformed faith on which they all agreed, a step towards the ‘reasonable religion’ of the enlightened eighteenth century.

21

Published in Europäische Mercurius (1694), 302–304.

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The print of the Alphen Pig War would then commend this resolution as a salutary intervention of state power in matters theological, a proper use of the sword at the foot of the tree. In this way the print would be, like those on the Arminian controversy earlier, published after the fact and as the proclamation and defence of the then current religious regime. Either way it invites rethinking religious identities. All this makes our picture an interesting link in the development from allegory to cartoon, and at the same time shows how representation of religious themes was circumscribed in the early modern period. The popular religious cartoon had to await the eighteenth century, when William Hogarth pioneered it.22 LITERATURE Primary literature Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van alle volkeren, Amsterdam, 1729–1803, 39 vols, vol. 16 (1746). Hollandtsche Mercurius (1687), pp. 162–171. Missive aen een seker Heer N.N. Inhoudende een verantwoordinge voor de eere van eenige Personen wegens een versierden Verken-strijt op een dorp by Alphen [no place, no date, in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague under shelfnr. Knuttel 11255]. Plemper, P., Beschryving van de heerlykheid en het dorp Alphen aan den Ryn. D’aaloude herkomst . . . en zyne huidendaagze geleegenheid. Doorwrocht met een voegzaame schets van het Heemraadschap van Rynland, Leiden 1714. Secundary literature Bergsma, W., ‘Een geleerde en zijn tuin. Over de vriendschap tussen Lubbertus en Vulcanius’, in De zeventiende eeuw 20 (2004), 96–121. Bijl, M. van der, Idee en interest. Voorgeschiedenis, verloop en achtergronden van de politieke twisten in Zeeland en vooral in Middelburg tussen 1702 en 1715, Groningen, 1981. Dinkelaar, H., Wilde F. de, Zwieten J. van (eds), Volk op viersprong. Acht verhalen over het verleden, om het heden van Alphen te verstaan, Alphen aan den Rijn, 1988 [Stichting Rijnlandse Historiën]. Es, J. van, Limes en linie. Twintig eeuwen verdedigingswerken tussen de Oude Rijn en de Hollandse IJssel, z.p. 2004, 50–62 (Stichts-Hollandsche Bijdragen 31). Hora Siccama, J.H. Aanteekeningen en verbeteringen op het register op de journalen van Constantijn Huygens den zoon, Amsterdam, 1915, 592–594. Israel, J.I., Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of modernity 1650–1750, Oxford, 2001. ———, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806, Oxford, 1995. Jongh, E. de, Kwesties van betekenis. Thema en motief in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw, Leiden, 1995.

22 See for an interesting comparison between early modern allegory and cartoon Lang, 1997, 167–171.

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Lang, B., Sacred Games. A History of Christian Worship, New Haven-London, 1997. Latour. B., ‘What is Iconoclash? or is there a world beyond the image wars?’, in: Latour, B., Weibel, P. (eds), Iconoclash. Beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, Karlsruhe, 2002 [Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie]. Muller, F., De Nederlandsche geschiedenis in platen. Beredeneerde beschrijving van Nederlandse historieplaten, zinneprenten en historische kaarten, Amsterdam, 1863–1882. 4 vols. vol. 1, 395–396 [print collection at the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam]. Regt, W.M.C., Gedenkboek ter gelegenheid van het 350–jarig bestaan der Nederlands Hervormde gemeente te Alphen aan den Rijn, z.j. 1932. Rijn, G. van, Atlas van Stolk. Katalogus der Historie-, Spot- en Zinneprenten betrekkelijk de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, Amsterdam, 1895–1931. 10 vols, vol. 3, 148–151 [print collection at the Museum Schielandhuis, Rotterdam]. Rooden, P. van, ‘De communicatieve ruimten van de Nijkerker beroeringen’, in Joke Spaans (ed.), Een golf van beroering. De omstreden religieuze opwekking in Nederland in het midden van de achttiende eeuw, Hilversum, 2001, 125–151. Weekhout, I., Boekencensuur in de Noordelijke Nederlanden. Een verkennend onderzoek naar de vrijheid van drukpers in de zeventiende eeuw, Den Haag, 1998 [IJkpunt 1650].

19. PAPAL PROHIBITIONS MIDWAY BETWEEN RIGOR AND LAXITY. ON THE ISSUE OF DEPICTING THE HOLY TRINITY Jan Hallebeek (Utrecht University) Introduction Twice in the history of the Catholic Church, a prohibition was issued by a Roman Pontiff against a particular way of depicting the Holy Trinity. This was rst done in the seventeenth century by Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, 1568–1644, Pope since 1623), and then, more than one hundred years later, by Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini 1675–1758, Pope since 1740). Although these prohibitions raise several interesting questions, this contribution aims at answering only two. What prompted the Popes to pronounce upon the subject, and, further, what can be said about the position they took up, relative to existing opinions within the Church? These two questions are closely related to the two themes of this volume. When pronouncing on images of the Holy Trinity, there is rst of all the fundamental question whether the Divine may be depicted at all (iconoclasm). Secondly, since the Popes just mentioned did not categorically reject this possibility, there arises the question of the proper way of depicting the Holy Trinity (iconoclash): what kind of images is permitted and for which purposes? These questions were, in the days of Urban VIII, by no means of recent origin. The debate on the ecclesiastical use of images in general and, more specically, on those of the Holy Trinity, dates from the sixteenth century, when a regular theology of images began to ourish, producing numerous treatises. It was largely historical events which prompted the theologians to pronounce upon the subject. Faced with the criticism from the Calvinists, who regarded the veneration of images as idolatry, i.e. the worship of idols, the Church’s reaction lead eventually to the decree on the veneration of saints and images (1563), issued at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Apart from the basic difference of opinion between Protestants and Catholics, there were also disagreements among Catholic writers regarding images and their veneration. This debate continued after the decree of Trent had been

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promulgated, since the Council had not pronounced upon all disputed issues, especially that of depicting the Holy Trinity. It is noteworthy that in the period after the Council, the Catholic debate was phrased in terms of the ‘correct’ interpretation of the decree of Trent. In the rst place early modern writers discussed the problem whether the non-incarnate Divine Persons, i.e. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and thus also the Holy Trinity, may be depicted at all. Apparently, this was not regarded as a superuous question, although from the high Middle Ages the ecclesiastical use of paintings and statues of the Holy Trinity was wide spread. As regards this question references can be found to the heresy of anthropomorphism which, judging by the writings of the historiographers Sokrates (c. 380–after 429) and his contemporary Sozomenos, existed in the early Church. It was considered a false conception of the Deity to present Him in a human form, acting as a human being and possessing human attributes. Early modern writers also referred to the chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux (c. 1035–1112), who recorded (AD 939) how Italy was disturbed by anthropomorphites and bishop Ratherius of Verona (c. 887–974) combated this heresy orally and in writing (PL 160, 183). Secondly, there was in the sixteenth century a continuous discussion about the way God the Father should be depicted. The theologians agreed that some images were not acceptable. They referred e.g. to the church father Cyril of Alexandria († 444), who in his Contra Julianum, a writing directed against the book Contra Galilaeos (against the Christians) of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331–363), recorded how the Egyptians presented the highest and supreme nature of God as an eye that was attached to a straight staff (PG 76, 959). This reference can be found, for example, in one of the most important treatises on images produced by the Counter Refor mation, De historia sanctarum imaginum et pictarum, written shortly after the Council had taken place by the Louvain professor of theology Jean Vermeulen (1533–1588). Vermeulen stated that such a way of depicting God was never approved by the Church. How, indeed, God the Father might be depicted, was a question under dispute. According to Vermeulen, God the Father can only be depicted as he appears in the Scriptures to mortal beings, viz. as in the vision of Daniel as ‘ancient of days’ (Dan 7.9) and as in the Apocalypse of John as ‘sitting on the throne’ (Rev 4).1 1 Johannes Molanus, De Historia sanctarum imaginum et pictarum II.3 (eds F. Bœspug e.a.), Paris 1996, 39.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 355 The vast majority of theologians agreed that during the rst thousand years of our era images and statues of the Holy Trinity were practically unknown, at any rate not wide spread. It is difcult to determine precisely when the practice of depicting the Holy Trinity arose but the majority of early modern writers consider that paintings and statues of the Trinity were probably uncommon before the year 1000. To support this view the writers referred to a number of documents. From a letter (Mansi XII, 959–982) by Pope Gregory II (715–731) to the Emperor Leo III (717–741) it appeared that in their day it was not permitted to depict the Holy Trinity.2 Another document to support this view, was a letter by Pope Nicholas I († 867), of the year 860, to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III (842–867). A certain passage of this letter suggests that at this period it was only permitted to depict Christ, the Virgin Mary and the other saints, but not God the Father nor the Holy Trinity, since the letter stated that God is invisible and incorporeal and does not appear to human eyes through the actual substance of his Deity, but through a ‘subjected’ creature (Mansi XV, 162–167, PL 119, 773–780). The strong appeal in early modern times to authoritative writers from the past and to the tradition, in particular with regard to the Early Church, should not surprise us. At some centres of theological education, such as the University of Louvain, scholarship was starting to follow new patterns. There was a greater emphasis on the Primitive Church, the Councils of the rst centuries and the church fathers, especially Augustine (354–430), while normative value was ascribed to this period. Thus for developing a theology of images, it was important to investigate if and how the Holy Trinity was depicted during the rst millennium. Moreover, it is also necessary to pay some attention to the historical developments of ecclesiastical art prior to the Counter Reformation and to the theologians’ opinions on images and their veneration in earlier times, in order to understand the early modern debate and to evaluate the papal prohibitions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

2 If this letter is not spurious, it was written in opposition to iconoclasm, but in his defence of the ecclesiastical use of images Gregory did not once refer to images of the Trinity.

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There are some images, dating from the rst millennium, which can be interpreted as representing the Trinity. The new basilica of St. Felix at Nola was decorated with an apsidal mosaic, described at length by Paulinus Nolanus (c. 353–431) in a letter (nr. 32) to Severus Sulpicius of Aquitania (c. 360–420/25). In the mosaic (g. 1) Christ is depicted as a lamb, the Holy Spirit has the form of a dove and God the Father is the voice from heaven, depicted as a hand descending from the clouds.3 Although according to some writers, such as the Louvain canonist Zeger-Bernard van Espen (1646–1728), it is clear that several church fathers disapproved of this image,4 it became accepted and appears to have been the least controversial of all ways of depicting the Trinity. Many early modern writers did not even discuss it in their treatises on images. The reason may have been its biblical base. It is seen more as an image of Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan (Matt 3.16–17, John 1.32) or an image of the mystery of the Trinity than an image of the Holy Trinity itself. There are also some anthropomorphic images dating from Antiquity which can be considered as representing the Trinity. These images, taking the form of three anthropoid gures, also express a biblical story or reect a certain moment in the economy of Salvation. On two early Christian sarcophaguses, dating from about 400, there is a scene known as ‘the creation of Eve’.5 We see Eve, depicted as a little girl next to Adam and surrounded by three relatively larger gures. One of these is raising his hand in blessing. It may be disputed, whether or not these three men represent the Trinity. Such an interpretation does seem to be in confor mity with the way in which the words from Gen 1.26 “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” were interpreted by Augustine, who taught that the plural forms of these words refer to

3 Paulinus Nolanus composed some verses honouring this image. They read as follows: “Pleno coruscat trinitas mysterio, Stat Christus agno, vox Patris caelo tonat, Et per columbam spiritus sanctus uit”. 4 Z.B. van Espen, Dissertatio in Synodum Nicaenam II § I, in Opera Omnia, Tom. VII, Louvain 1766, 428 and note a. 5 One, also known as the dogmatic sarcophagus, was found in 1838 in the church of St. Paul outside the walls in Rome and is preserved in the Museo Pio Cristiano (formerly the Museo Laterano) in the Vatican City. The other was discovered in 1974 in the surroundings of Arles and belongs nowadays to the collection of the Musée d’art chrétien of that city.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 357 the plurality of persons in the Holy Trinity: the idea of the Trinity as creator of the world.6 Another image showing three persons, which are often considered to represent the Holy Trinity, is that of the ‘hospitality of Abraham’ (Gen 18.1–15). Soon after Abraham had entered into a covenant with the Lord at the age of 99, he entertained three guests. This biblical story can be found on a mosaic in the Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, dating from circa 340. It consists of several scenes. At the top Abraham welcomes the three visitors, while at the bottom we see him talking with Sarah and with the guests at table. What strikes one in this mosaic, are the historic elements, not essential for depicting the Trinity but nevertheless present, for example Sarah baking cakes with her three measures of ne meal. A similar image of Abraham’s hospitality can be found as a fresco in the catacomb of the Via Latina in Rome, discovered in 1955. It dates from the rst half of the fourth century.7 It could well be that these images were merely regarded as reecting the biblical story from Genesis, but there is a long-standing tradition of considering the three visitors of Abraham as a representation of the Holy Trinity and, as a consequence, the image of Abraham’s hospitality as an image of the Holy Trinity. Augustine had stated that Abraham had seen three persons, but he worshipped only one.8 The Second Council of Nicaea (787) was of the utmost importance for the ecclesiastical use of images. It put a stop to iconoclasm and declared it henceforth permissible to depict Christ, the Virgin Mary and other saints. However, the Council did not pronounce upon the image of the Trinity. Some writers of the sixteenth century tried to explain this. According to the French historian Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), at the time of the Council, images of the Holy Trinity, God the Father or the Holy Spirit were not yet admitted into Churches.9 According to

6

Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram, III.19 (CSEL 28, 85–86). On the fresco Abraham is sitting under the terebinths of Mamre. Not only according the later Vulgate translation (404), but also according to the older texts of the Old Testament as used by the Christians, such as the Septuagint and the Vetus Latina, Abraham stood up right away when the visitors arrived and was standing while he spoke with them. However, the seated Abraham is entirely in confor mity with rabbinic exegesis: the three visitors ordered Abraham to remain seated, because only three days earlier Abraham had been circumcised; see Stemberger, 29–30. 8 Tres vidit et unum adoravit; cf. Augustinus, Contra Maximinum, XXVI.7 (PL 42, 809); cf. also De Trinitate II.11 (CCSL 50, 106–108) and De Civitate Dei, XVI.29 (CCSL 48, 533–535). 9 Johannes Mabillonius, Praefationes actis Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, Rouen 1732, In IV. Saeculum Benedictorum, § III, nr. 19 (183). 7

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others the Council did not pronounce at all upon three-dimensional statues, but only upon surfaces, painted images and mosaics.10 Controversial images of the Holy Trinity from the Middle Ages During the Middle Ages various images of the Holy Trinity came into existence and were exhibited in Churches. Some forms were more controversial than others. Although before the Reformation there was within the Catholic Church some criticism regarding the veneration of statues in general and the existence of statues of the Holy Trinity in particular, the theology of images, and thus the discussion concerning what is permissible and what is not, only started to ourish when the Refor mation and Counter Reformation prompted theologians to incorporate their ideas in treatises. Before turning to the early modern period to see which categories of images were regarded as acceptable, it is appropriate rst to describe the various medieval categories of controversial images of the Trinity: anthropomorphic Trinities, threeheaded and three-faced Trinities and the ‘opening Virgin’. In the Middle Ages a number of writers followed the view of Augustine that the three visitors of Abraham, mentioned in Genesis 18, represent the Trinity. Amongst these were, in the twelfth century, the Benedictine abbot Rupert of Deutz (1070–1129) who considered the three visitors to be angels giving form to the mystery of the Trinity (PL 167, 400–401) and in the fteenth century the English Carmelite Thomas Netter or Waldensis (1377–1430).11 Following this exegesis of the Biblical story it was possible to regard the three visitors of Abraham, and thus also the image of Abraham’s hospitality, as a representation of the Holy Trinity.12 10 Z.B. van Espen, Dissertatio in Synodum Nicaenam II, § IX, in Opera Omnia, Tom. VII, Louvain 1766, 448. 11 Thomas Waldensis, Doctrinale antiquitatum dei catholicae Ecclesiae De sacramentalibus, Tom. III, Venice 1759 (reprint Farnborough 1967), Tit. XIX, 155.2 (935–936). Also in later centuries Augustine’s interpretation of the three visitors was acknowledged, by e.g. the Jesuit and leading theologian of Spanish late scholasticism Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) and by the oratorian Jean-Baptiste Duhamel (1624–1706). See Franciscus Suarez, Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem tomi quinque, Tom. I, Mainz 1617, qu. XXV, art. III, disp. LIV, sectio II (794b) and Jean Baptiste Du Hamel, Biblia Sacra vulgatae editionis, Paris 1705, ad Gen 18.10. 12 There were also different views. Some church fathers had already suggested that the three visitors were Christ in the company of two angels. Moreover, there was the Jewish exegesis, viz. that the visitors were three angels: Michael with at his right hand

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 359 At a certain stage in the later Middle Ages, the image of Abraham’s hospitality with its clearly biblical roots continued to be used, but increasingly started to serve as an expression of the theological doctrine of the Trinity, rather than the representation of a Biblical story or a certain stage in the history of Salvation. Historical elements such as Sarah, baking cakes, and the terebinths of Mamre seem to have become redundant and sometimes other, non-biblical elements were introduced. This turning point in religious art can be explained by the fact that theology developed a serious interest in the Trinity as a theological concept (Bœspug, 1984, 288–299). From this time onwards we can distinguish between the Trinity in relation to the economy of Salvation and the immanent Trinity, i.e. the Trinity theologically considered “in itself ”. The theology of an immanent Trinity is also reected in a new way of depicting the Trinity, which emerged after the eleventh century. These images differed from those of the ‘creation of Eve’ and the ‘hospitality of Abraham’ in that the three persons were now depicted entirely apart from any specic stage in the history of Salvation. Sometimes the gures differed in that God the Father was clearly older than Christ and the Holy Spirit. Further, the Divine persons could often be distinguished by the attributes they were holding. One of the oldest images which seems to stand at the root of the development of this category originates from Sherborne in Dorset (England). It can be found in the so-called pontical of St. Dunstan, dating from the end of the tenth century. On three separate pages three single drawings can be seen: the gures of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. At a later stage the three gures were grouped together.

Gabriel and at his left hand Raphael. Some Christian writers referred also to this explanation e.g. the French commentator Nicolaus of Lyra (c. 1265–1349). To his mind it was the Lord who appeared to Abraham as three angels who had adopted an anthropoid form (Biblia sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria (. . .) et postilla Nic. Lirani Franc. ad Gen. 18 Antwerp 1634, 233). According to fteenth century Spanish bishop Alfonse ‘el Tostado’ of Avila (1400–1455), the signicance of the names of the angels in the Jewish interpretation, going back to the commentary of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, 1040–1105), corresponds perfectly with their tasks. Michael (who is like God?) had come to announce the pregnancy of Sarah, from whom the Messiah eventually would be born. Gabriel (God’s power) had come to destroy Sodom, while Raphael (God heals) had come to heal Abraham and to save Loth (Alphonsus Tostatus ad Gen 18 cap. XVIII, in Opera Omnia, Tom. I, Cologne 1613, 503). The Jewish exegesis was also brought up in later times, e.g. in the famous exegetical works of the Flemish Jesuits Jacques Tirin (1580–1636) and Cornelis van den Steen (1567–1637). See Jacobus Tirinus ad Gen 18, in Commentarius in Sacram Scripturam Tom. I, Lyons 1723, 9 and Cornelius Cornelii a Lapide ad Gen 18, in Commentaria in pentateuchum Mosis, Antwerp 1714, 175.

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Apart from this category of images of three men of varied ages, there were also the groups of three anthropoid persons with an identical appearance, i.e. gures of the same age and the same physical features. Sometimes they could be distinguished from each other by their clothing or attributes. Sometimes even this was impossible. A good example is the altar of the potters’ guild (Töpferaltar) from circa 1515, carved in sandstone for St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna (g. 2). It shows three identical gures. Each has a beard, each wears headgear and each holds a globe. Only their garments differ. Prompted by the papal brief Sollicitudini Nostrae, which will be dealt with more fully below, in the year 1745 this altar was removed from the Cathedral of Vienna and placed in the Church of St. Helen in the neighbouring town of Baden where it remains to the present day. Apart from the several kinds of image consisting of three gures, the Holy Trinity was, during the Middle Ages, also depicted as a human gure with three heads or as a single head with three faces. For the roots of this image in Christianity, some early modern writers referred to the Ethiopians. In his work on the religion of this people, the Portuguese humanist Damião a Góis (1502–1574) quoted an Ethiopian writer, saying “For this reason we say that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three faces (tres vultus) in one similitude and Divinity”.13 Modern literature, however, suggests various other origins of the three-headed Trinity: mythical gures from classical Antiquity, ancient three-headed Divinities ranging from India to Europe and three-headed Celtic Gods dating from the days of the Christianisation of the peoples of Northern Europe. During the Middle Ages, the three-headed Trinity was introduced in various ways. The earliest examples are probably two miniatures depicting the hospitality of Abraham,14 but many more examples, especially frescos, have survived until the present day. A relief

13 Damianus à Goes, Fides, religio moresque aethiopum, Lyons 1561, 59. This quotation was adopted by Vermeulen and by many others. However, it does not contain very convincing evidence for the origin of the three-headed Divinity in Christianity. The editor of the Louvain edition 1771 of Vermeulen’s treatise, Jean Noël Paquot (1722–1803), wrote in a footnote that the Latin words tres vultus are a translation of the Greek words    and that these words do not necessarily mean three faces (tres vultus), but could also have had the signicance of three characters (tres personae). See Molanus, II.4. ed. Paquot, Louvain 1771, 38. 14 Ms. Cambridge, St. John’s College K 26, fol. 9r and 9v. Other examples can be found in the Hrvoje’s Missal (at the votive Mass of the Holy Trinity), dating from about 1404, and in the manuscript of the Schwabenspiegel (Speculum Suevicum) of Wiener Neustadt from the year 1423 (Ms ÖNB, Codex 2780).

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 361 over the niche (taber naculo) of the market court (tribunale della mercanzia) on the outside of the Church of Orsanmichele in Florence, sculptured by Donatello (c. 1386–1466), shows a three-headed Divinity. It is said that it was this image that a later bishop of Florence, Antoninus Florentinus (1389–1489), had in mind, when he declared that the three-headed Trinity must be regarded as monstrous. Besides the genuine threeheaded Trinities, there was also the three-faced version, i.e. the gure having one head with three faces. These images could even assume a form in which the three faces were somewhat melted together, resulting in a head with three noses and three mouths but only four eyes. In the sixteenth century, when the rst theological treatises on images were published, the three-headed and three-faced Trinities were immediately criticized by the vast majority of theologians. There seems to be only one writer who in the sixteenth century was still prepared to defend the existence of such images, viz. the Jesuit Gregory of Valencia (1550–1603). He claimed that the three-faced image expressed the unity of essence and the diversity of persons within the Holy Trinity.15 The Humanists regarded the three-headed or three-faced forms as monstrous, i.e. as a deviation or deformation. As a consequence these forms were considered to represent a diabolic being rather than the Divine Essence. However, the diabolic character of three-headed gures derived from Antiquity. In fact the three-headed gures in Christian Western Europe, which may well be precursors to the three-headed Trinity, were monsters from Antiquity. The counter seal of archbishop Roger of York († 1181) showed a three-headed chimera provided with the inscription + caput nostrv· trinitas· est. The seal of Henry de Lancaster, Earl of Derby (1281–1345), showed a human head with three faces. According to the legend this triune head was supposed to be an image of the Trinity (Smith, 72), but long before the sixteenth century there was already a deeply rooted conviction that three heads represent the diabolic. It is said that in about the year 1121 a novice of the Premonstratensians was, during Matins, contemplating the mystery of the Holy Trinity (PL 170, 1285, PL 160, 365). He was suddenly addressed by the ‘ancient adversary’ (i.e. Satan), who subsequently appeared to him as a gure with three heads, claiming to be the Holy Trinity. However, the novice

15 Gregorius de Valentia, Commentariorum theologicorum Tomus IV, Lyons 1619, Disputatio I, Quaestio XXIV, Punctum II (341).

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did not sense the murmuring of a soft breeze (sibilus aurae lenis) as in the vision of the prophet Elijah (1 Kgs 19.12), but a fetid whirlwind ( foetidus ventus turbinis). This enabled him to expose the devil, give him a sound lecture and put him to ight (Bœspug, 1998). From the sixteenth century onwards the vast majority of writers considered the three-headed and three-faced images to be monstrous and not acceptable as representing the Holy Trinity. For this reason they maintained that painters and sculptors are not free to act at their own discretion. Bishop Antoninus Florentinus of Florence explicitly dealt with the duties of artists and painters. They give offence when they paint provocative images, arousing feelings of lasciviousness, such as those of nude women. However, it is equally reprehensible when they create images which are incompatible with the Christian faith, such as the image of the Trinity as one person with three heads, which is a monster in the nature of things.16 General disapproval of the threeheaded and three-faced Trinities can also be found in the works of the Louvain professors Jacques Masson (c. 1475–1544)17 and Jean Hessels (1522–1566).18 As will be shown below, the latter was also hostile to the exposition and veneration of certain other images. According to François Du Bois (1581–1649), professor at Douai, artists should restrict themselves to those images of which the Church approved. However, he did not explain which images these were. Apparently the three-headed Trinities were not considered as belonging to this category, although this had not yet been ofcially proclaimed.19 In addition, Gabriel Vazquez (1549–1604), professor at the Roman college, and the Jesuit cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (1542–1621) warned artists not to use their own imagination.20 In his writing on images, Bellarmino, just as his fellowJesuit Louis Richeome (1544–1625), was primarily addressing Calvin and other reformers. Nevertheless these writers also paid attention to the situation within the Catholic Church and stated that Catholic painters 16 Antoninus Florentinus, Summa Theologica, Pars III, Venice 1582, tit. VIII cap. 4 § 11 (101r). 17 Jacobus Latomus, De cultu imaginum, in Opera quae praecipue adversus horum temporum haereses eruditissime, Louvain 1579, 202v. 18 Joannes Hesselius, Brevis et catholica decalogi expositio, Louvain 1567, cap. 66 (59r). 19 Franciscus Sylvius, Comentarii in tertiam partem sancti Thomae Aquinatis, Antwerp 1695, Quaestio XXV, art. III, queritur II (111). 20 Gabriel Vazquez, Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem Sancti Thomae Tomus Primus, Lyons 1631, Q. XXV, art. III, disp. CIII, cap. IV (676); Robertus Bellarminus, Disputationum de controversiis christianae dei adversus hujus temporis haereticos Tom. II, Milan 1721, Contr. IV, Lib. II, cap. VIII (699–704).

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 363 had given offence and damaged the Church through their three-headed and three-faced Trinities. They had given the Ministri Hungarici a cause for blasphemy. In their work Contra Trinitatem these ministers had collected all kinds of images of the Trinity, presented them as ridiculously portrayed monsters and provided them with names such as Cerberus, Geryones, three-faced Janus, monsters and idols.21 Another controversial image of the Trinity was the so-called ‘opening Virgin’, in French termed vierge ouvrante, in German Klappmadonna. The ‘opening Virgin’ was a statue of the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus on her arm. It could be opened like a triptych, making the inner part visible. This often consisted of an image of Christ on the cross, or alternatively a complete Throne of Grace, i.e. Christ on the cross with behind the cross God the Father and a dove representing the Holy Spirit. It was especially the ‘opening Virgin’ containing a Throne of Grace, and thus carrying the Holy Trinity in her womb, that was criticized. On Xmas Day 1396 the Parisian theologian Jean Gerson (1363–1429) had mentioned this kind of statue in his sermon.22 Gerson, contemplating the text of Isa 9.6 (unto us a child is born), stated that he had seen a statue of the ‘opening Virgin’ in the Church of the Carmelites. According to Gerson, it lacked all beauty and devotion and was capable of causing error and blasphemy. In the sixteenth century Vermeulen followed Gerson’s view and maintained that he had only fully understood Gerson’s criticism the day he had seen such a statue with his own eyes at the Carthusian monastery of Diest not far from Louvain. Gerson and Vermeulen also stated why they considered the statue to be deceptive: it could easily create the false impression that the entire Trinity was incarnate.23 For Vermeulen the opening Virgin could well be—in terms of the Council of Trent—an image portraying a misconception or a false doctrine.24

21 The work refered to here is De falsa et vera unius Dei patris, lii et spiritus sancti cognitione libri duo. Writeribus ministris Ecclesiarum consentientium in Sarmatia et Transylvania, Alba Julia [1568], reprint introd. by Antal Pirnát [Bibliotheca Unitariorum, 2], Utrecht 1988. This work was probably edited by Ferenc Dávid (1510–1579) and Giorgio Biandrata (1515–1590). 22 P. Glorieux, Jean Gerson Oevres complètes Vol. VII, L’œvre Française; Sermons et Discours, Paris etc. 1968, nr. 385 Pour le jour de Noël (963–964). 23 Molanus, o.c., II.4 (43). 24 As a matter of fact, there is doubt as to whether such a false doctrine, viz. that the entire Trinity has been incarnate, actually existed. However, this possibility should not be excluded. The Symbolum of the Ninth Council of Toledo (675) explicitly rejected such an idea and emphasized that it was exclusively God the Son who adopted

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There is another theological concept upon which the statue of the opening Virgin may be based, viz. that of in-dwelling. The soul of Mary, in a miraculous state of grace, would be inhabited by the Holy Trinity. Gerson was familiar with this idea, as will be shown below, but he did not accept it as the underlying justication for the statue of the opening Virgin. The concept of in-dwelling was derived from John 14.23: “and we will come to him and make our home with him” and the idea of the in-dwelling of the Holy Trinity, as specically applied to the Virgin Mary, was not unusual in the Middle Ages. We nd it, for example, in the sermon of the French Cistercian monk Helinand of Froidmont (c. 1160–after 1229) for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, in which the former minstrel qualied Mary as the templum totius Trinitatis (PL 212, 638), while the philosopher and theologian Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) spoke about triclinium Trinitatis (PL 177, 139). The qualication of Mary as the noble dwelling of the Trinity also penetrated into liturgical texts. The famous poet Adam of St. Victor (twelfth century) wrote for the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin the sequence Salve Mater Salvatoris, containing the words “Salve, mater pietatis, Et totius trinitatis, Nobile triclinium”. It was to this sequence that Jean Gerson in his sermon of 28 May 1396, when dealing with the Trinity, qualied Mary as a sacred temple of the entire Trinity. However, at the same time he emphasized that Mary is more specically the dwelling of God the Son because of the mystery on the incarnation.25 Yet it is not clear why the idea of the in-dwelling of the Holy Trinity in the Virgin Mary seems to have been accepted in liturgical texts, but was rejected and later even explicitly prohibited in visual arts. In the literature it was suggested that indwelling in the womb, as in the case of the statue of the opening Virgin, was improper and indecent, whereas indwelling in Mary’s soul or heart, a spiritual organ, was something different (Bœspug, 1984, 280–285).

our human nature (Cf. H. Denzinger, Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrentscheidungen. Verbessert, erweitert, ins Deutsche übertragen und unter Mitarbeit von Helmut Hoping herausgegeben von Peter Hünermann. Freiburg 199137, 535). In modern literature a further ground for objections against the statue was brought up. The image could be based upon the heterodox doctrine that without the Virgin Mary there could have been no Salvation, the theology of Mary as radix sancta, the holy root of Salvation (Warner, 47). 25 Glorieux, Gerson, nr. 354 (672).

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 365 The Council of Trent, the theologians and the papal prohibitions As stated above the Council of Trent pronounced in general terms on the veneration of saints and images, but not specically upon the question of depicting the Trinity. The main purpose was to refute the criticism of Jean Calvin (1509–1564), who considered the veneration of images to be idolatry. As a response to Calvin’s objections against the ecclesiastical use of paintings and statues, Catholic theologians had started to publish on the question even before the Council of Trent could deal with it. This they continued to do after the Council had in 1563 issued its decree on the veneration of images. Catholic criticism prior to the Council Within the tradition of Catholic theology there were, already during the Middle Ages, scholars who rejected the veneration of images in general or images of the Holy Trinity in particular. The Dominican and scholastic theologian Durand de Saint-Pourçin (1270–1332) taught that images of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit should not be considered as representing the Divine Persons. As a consequence no respect was owed to these images and they should not be worshipped.26 Depicting the Holy Trinity was prohibited by the chapter of the Franciscan order of Perpignan (1331).27 Alfonse ‘el Tostado’ stated that it is inappropriate to depict the Trinity as a statue or gure, even although the Church had accepted or did not oppose the anthropomorphic image in the shape of three persons. However, the Trinity cannot be depicted in an appropriate manner, since it is not delineated by corporeal boundaries.28 It was Friedrich Nausea or Grau (1496–1552), bishop of Vienna, who in his commentary on the Catholic catechism criticized the veneration of images on various grounds, viz. the expensive materials used in their creation, the unnecessary number of images, the secular vanity displayed, the inability of images to express the faith

26 Durandus a Sancto Porciano, In Petri Lombardi Sententias Theologicas commentariorum libri IIII, Venice 1571 (reprint Ridgewood 1964), Lib. III, dist. IX, qu. II ad 4 (230rb–230va). 27 S. Mencherini, Constitutiones generales Ordinis Fratrum Minorum a Capitulo Perpiniani anno 1331 celebrato editae V (De divino ofcio), nr. 11, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 2 (1909), 269–292, 412–430, 575–598, esp. 288. 28 Alphonsus Tostatus, Opera Tomi III Pars altera, Cologne 1613, ad Deut 4, qu. V (37).

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and good deeds of the saints, the non-biblical character of the saints’ legends and the imminent danger that the cult around images would lead to idolatry. Moreover, Nausea asked how it was possible to depict the Holy Trinity, which is God himself, since neither its unity of essence nor its trinity of persons can be seen.29 Then there was Martín Pérez de Ayala (1503–1566), archbishop of Valencia. When discussing the sacred images, he dealt only with images of Christ and the saints and did not even mention images of God the Father, the Holy Spirit or the Trinity. Moreover, he saw only two justications for the existence and veneration of images, viz. rstly to make a stand against heretics who deny the humanity of Christ and, secondly, to give the unlettered something to inspire them or because of which they can thank God or follow the good example of the saints which the images represent.30 The sermon of St. Germain-en-Laye (1562) Just before the nal session of the Council of Trent, the question was also discussed during the sermon (Religionsgespräch) of St. Germain-enLaye ( Jedin, 1935). This session took place from 28 January until 11 February 1562 following a demand from the Queen Mother, Catharine de Medici (1519–1589), only a few months after the unsuccessful sermon of Poissy. Apart from the Calvinists, amongst whom Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605), and a delegation from the Sorbonne, presided over by the dean of the Faculty of Theology, Nicholas Maillard, there were also some participants appointed by the Queen Mother. One of these was the Parisian theologian Claude d’Espence (1511–1571). Together with ve kindred spirits he belonged to the so-called ‘neutrals’, who tried to adopt a middle course between, on the one hand, the opinion of the Calvinists that all veneration of images is idolatry, and, on the other hand, the opinion of the Catholic delegates who defended the existence of the traditional cults and veneration of images. All three parties presented their views, the ‘neutrals’ on 8 February. The ‘neutrals’ maintained that images of the Holy Trinity are prohibited by Scripture, the Councils, and by learned and holy scholars. By royal order these statues should be removed from Churches as well as from

29 Fredericus Nausea, In catholicum catechismum libri quinque, Antwerp 1551, Lib. IV, cap. VIII (143v–144r). 30 Martinus Peresius Aiala, De divinis, apostolicis atque ecclesiasticis traditionibus, Cologne 1560, Pars II, cons. VII (229–232).

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 367 all other public or private sites. Moreover, all statues of saints whose legend is rejected by the Church as apocryphal should be removed. It was not allowed to provide statues with crowns or clothes. They should not be carried around in processions. No vows or oblations should be addressed to images and in order that no candles be lit or incense burnt for statues, they should—apart from the crucix—be removed from the altars.31 In short, images of saints have a function only in religious education. The cult around images should as far as possible be suppressed. The French historian Jacques-Auguste Thou (1535–1617) paraphrased the text of the opinion of the ‘neutrals’ in Latin and clearly linked it to Espence as its writer. Thou also recorded that Bèze appeared to be willing to sign this proposal and only made a reservation as regards the crucix. For this reason Thou denounced the rejection of this proposal by the dean of the Theological College, Nicolas Maillard, who in contravention of the proposal wanted to maintain the entire cult around images.32 This support of the historian Thou for the proposal of the ‘neutrals’ was afterwards strongly censured by the Jesuit Jacob Gretser (1562–1624), professor of theology at Ingolstadt, who stated that if it were up to Thou, all images had to go, and that Espence had deviated from the Catholic doctrine and had fallen to the heresy of iconoclasm.33 The opinion composed by the delegation from the Sorbonne defended the existence of the images of the Trinity which the ‘neutrals’ wanted to be removed from the Churches ( Jedin, 1935, 183). At St. Germainen-Laye the parties had not come closer together, rather the differences had been aggravated. After this attempt at reconciliation failed, a period of thirty years of religious war lay ahead. The decree on the veneration of saints and images of the Council of Trent (1563) It was the opinion of the delegation of the Sorbonne as presented at the sermon of St. Germain-en-Laye which served as a pattern

31 The text can be found in Carolus du Plessis d’Argentre, Collectio judiciorum de novis erroribus, qui ab initio duodecimi seculi post incarnationem verbi usque ad annum 1632 in ecclesia proscripti sunt et notati II, Paris 1728, reprint Brussels 1963, 333. 32 Jacobus Thuanus, Historarum sui temporis libri CXXV, Parijs 1609–1614, Pars III, Lib. XXIX (198–199). 33 Jacobus Gretserus, Opera Omnia, Tom. XVII, Regensburg 1741, Pars II, In Jacobi Augusti Thuani historiarum libros, XI Thuanus Pseudotheologus, 57.

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for the decree of the Council of Trent on the veneration of saints and images, dating from the 25th and last session of the Council, 3 December 1563. The Council defended the practice of the Catholic Church against the criticism of Calvin. The images themselves do not contain anything of the Divine or of a nature which can justify their veneration. They only encourage Catholics to venerate Christ and the saints whose likenesses they represent (Denzinger, 1823). Unlike the opinion of the Sorbonne theologians, the Council did not pronounce upon the image of the Trinity. Adrian († 1669) and his brother Peter († 1675) Walenburch, successively auxiliary bishops of Cologne who were born in Rotterdam, suggested later that this was because there was much disagreement amongst the Catholic theologians as regards the question whether or not it is permissible to create or possess images of God the Father and of the Holy Trinity. Moreover, to their mind the question was no part of the Catholic doctrine which was accepted by all or should be accepted by all.34 After the decree of Trent on images was formulated, the theology of images expanded enormously. The bishop, later archbishop, of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), even suggested drawing up an index of prohibited images of the basis of the Council’s decree.35 Interpretation of the decree by authoritative writers: Raynaud, Vermeulen and Capizucchi Unlike the council fathers of Trent, a majority of the learned theologians did pronounce upon the question whether or not the Holy Trinity can be depicted. It seems that gradually a majority emerged who were willing to answer this question in the afrmative. Sometimes so many opinions approving images of the Trinity were referred to that it seemed as if Catholic theology was unanimous. The French Jesuit Théophile Raynaud (1583–1663) enlisted numerous writers, writing before and after the decree of Trent, all approving of images of the Trinity.36 He mentioned writers such as Waldensis, Vermeulen, Suarez and Vazquez. Amongst the supporters Raynaud rated the Italian dominican Ambrose

34 Adrianus & Petrus de Walenburch, Tractatus de controversiis dei, Tom. II, Cologne 1671, Tract. IV (De sanctis), cap. XXX, n. 1–2 (252). 35 Text in P. Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del cinquecento fra manierismo e controri forma Tom. II, Bari 1961, 265–267 and 353–358. 36 Theophilus Raynaudus, Heteroclita spiritualia coelestium et infernorum, in Opera, Tom. XV, Lyons 1665, Sectio I, Punct. I (23).

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 369 Catharin (Lancelotto de Politi, 1484–1553), professor at Siena and bishop of Minori; the Portuguese theologian Diego Andrada de Payva (1528–1575), who defended the decrees of Trent against the criticism of Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586); the jurist and theologian Konrad Braun (1491–1563), canon at Augsburg and Regensburg;37 the English priest and professor at Louvain Nicholas Sanders (1530–1581); and the Jesuit Francisco Torres (Turrianus, 1504–1584). Many of these writers, though, do require that the Divine persons are depicted in conformity with the Scriptures, e.g. the Holy Spirit as a dove or as tongues of re and not in a different way.38 There were two theologians who exerted a considerable inuence on further developments in interpreting the decree on the images, viz. Vermeulen, mentioned several times above, and the Italian Dominican and cardinal, Raimondo Camillo Capizucchi (1616–1691). As will be shown below, both were, together with Raynaud, quoted in the document on images which was in 1745 issued by Pope Benedict XIV. Vermeulen was important, because his treatise soon acquired considerable authority. Since it declared certain images of the Trinity acceptable, this enabled Capizucchi to list in a practical way which categories of images of the Trinity could be considered traditional and approved by the Church. Due to various circumstances (Hecht, 18–19), Vermeulen’s treatise was from the beginning of the seventeenth century regarded as semiofcial. As just stated, Vermeulen taught that images of the Trinity could be allowed. However, we have to emphasize here that he did not present his opinion as the undisputed doctrine of Trent. The decree itself gave no clear and positive answer to the question whether the non-incarnate Divine Persons could be depicted. Moreover, Vermeulen warned that statues or images of God the Father and the Trinity should not be exhibited without the necessary pastoral guidance of the faithful. For example, it should be explained that the image of God the Father as in the vision of Daniel, i.e. depicted as ‘ancient of days’ sitting on the throne for whom all books are opened, only denotes the eternity of God’s innite wisdom, enabling him to know and judge all human action.39 Moreover, Vermeulen required images of God the Father and 37

Conradus Brunus, De imaginibus liber unus, Mainz 1548, cap. III i.f. (20–21). See, e.g. Nicolaus Sanders, De typica et honoraria sacrarum imaginum adoratione libri duo, Louvain 1569, Lib. I, cap. IV (17–20). 39 Molanus, o.c., II.3 (38–42). 38

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God the Holy Spirit to be in conformity with the Scriptures. Monstrous images of the Trinity, i.e. three-headed and three-faced images as well as the ‘opening Virgin’, he rejected entirely. There was even one image of the Trinity, which would, in later days, be regarded as approved by the Church, but which he intensely disliked, viz. the Compassion of the Father (Compassio Patris). This was a kind of Pietà, showing Christ taken from the cross lying on the lap of God the Father. This image also lacked a biblical justication. Christ had never manifested himself in the form of a dead corpse.40 Vermeulen was cautious. He saw the imminent danger of anthopomorphism and by no means did he pretend that his opinion was the only correct interpretation of the decree of Trent. Yet he did not reject images of the non-incarnate persons in the Holy Trinity and his treatise became signicant. The next step was not only to discuss the images which were considered controversial, but also to lay down which categories of images of the Trinity should be seen as traditional and acceptable, categories which had been in existence for centuries, although the theologians had not dealt with them explicitly. Roughly there were two categories of images of the Trinity which could be approved. Both differed from anthropomorphic Trinities of three anthropoid gures in the sense that the three Divine persons are not depicted as isolated from each other, but always in a mutual relationship, as if Christ always continues to be one with the Father. The subdivision into two principal categories can be found in Capizucchi, viz. (i) God the Father situated behind (the suffering) Christ and between them the Holy Spirit as a dove, or (ii) God the Father opposite the risen Christ with the Holy Spirit between them in the form of a dove.41 The essential difference between these categories consists in the fact that in the rst Christ is more or less ‘surrounded’ by God the Father, whereas in the second there is a certain space between the two. In both categories God the Father is depicted as the ‘ancient of days’ as in the vision of Daniel. The rst type shows a vertical image and has various subcategories. One of the oldest is the so-called Throne of Grace, dating from the twelfth century, although the term (in German Gnadenstuhl ) was used for the rst time by Martin Luther (1483–1546) in his translation 40

Molanus, o.c., IV.16 (421). Raimundus Capisucchius, (. . .) Controversiae theologicae selectae, scholasticae, morales, dogmaticae, scripturales ad mentem D. Thomae Aquinatis (. . .) resolutae (. . .), Rome 1670, Contr. XXVI, qu. I, par. XI, § ult. (614). 41

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 371 of Heb 9.5 and Rom 3.25. God the Father, depicted as ‘ancient of days’, is situated behind Christ on the cross showing his paternal love. Another subcategory is the so-called Compassio Patris, the compassion of the Father. Christ, taken from the cross, is lying on the lap of God the Father, a reference to the incarnation of Christ as only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father ( John 1.18). This is the image of which Vermeulen disapproved. The Holy Spirit is sometimes shown as a dove poised over the head of God the Father. Finally there is the Paternitas (Paternity). God the Father presents the child Jesus (Immanuel) holding the dove. This image, inspired by the words of Luke 3.22 “Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased” has a Byzantine origin. From the eleventh century it had gradually penetrated into the West. The second category of traditional images, also termed the Trinity of the Psalter, shows a horizontal image: Christ is situated opposite God the Father. Now, the two gures are separated from each other by a certain space. It is a clear reference to the rst psalm of the Sunday vespers, in the Vulgate psalm 109: “The Lord says to my lord: sit at my right hand”, David’s words pointing to Christ’s elevation to the right hand of God (Acts 2.34). The Holy Spirit is again represented as the dove between the two gures. In summary, Vermeulen’s authoritative treatise paved the way for the acceptance by many writers that, provided certain requirements are met, the Trinity can be depicted. The way in which this may be done was further elaborated by writers such as Capizucchi. This is not to say that the writers who followed Vermeulen, also agreed on all minor issues. Capizucchi neither approved, nor rejected the anthropomorhic Trinities. Juan Interián de Ayala (1656–1730), professor at Salamanca, on the other hand considered anthropomorphic Trinities with identical gures and no distinguishing features as absolutely reprehensible. However, he did not share the doubts of Vermeulen as regards the Compassio Patris. In his own convent there was such a statue in the sala De profundis. He maintained that, in spite of the objections of a sensible writer (Vermeulen?), this image exuded an atmosphere of compassion and contained features making it suitable for effective and appropriate instruction.42

42 Juan Interian de Ayala, El pintor christiano y erudito, Madrid 1782, Lib. II, cap. III, n. 8–10 (110–114).

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The papal prohibitions As stated in the introductory paragraph, two Roman Pontiffs pronounced explicitly on depicting the Holy Trinity. The rst was Urban VIII. On 11 August 1628 he issued a prohibition against depicting the Holy Trinity as a gure with one body, three mouths, three noses and four eyes. Apart from this, there is hardly anything known about this papal decision, which was handed down through several secondary sources, all dating from the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.43 Previously in 1625 the Inquisition had prohibited certain images of the Holy Trinity, viz. those with one body and three faces or two faces with a dove in between.44 The second Pope who pronounced upon depicting the Holy Trinity was Benedict XIV. This was done in the brief Sollicitudini Nostrae of 1 October 1745 addressed to the prince-bishop of Augsburg, Joseph Landgraf von Hessen-Darmstadt (1699–1768).45 What prompted the Pope’s pronouncement was the image of the Holy Spirit as a youngster surrounded by seven tongues of re. This image (g. 3) was painted after the vision of the Franciscan sister Crescentia von Kaufbeuren (1682–1744, canonized in 2001). Benedict XIV apparently felt obliged to intervene, and took the opportunity to pronounce upon the ecclesiastical use of images and statues in a wider sense: especially those depicting God the Father, God the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity. The brief is based upon two separate investigations. This appears from the fact that § 24 speaks about an altera disquisitio. In this § 24 for the rst time in the brief the question is brought up whether it is permissible to depict the Holy Trinity. The Pope adopted the opinion of Vermeulen that the Holy Trinity may indeed be depicted and he referred to the numerous writers endorsing this view whom Théophile Raynaud had listed (§ 25). Subsequently he drew a distinction between three categories of images: those prohibited, those tolerated and those approved. Prohibited were the monsters, the gures with one body and three heads or one head

43 The document cannot be found in the Archive of the Holy Ofce. I thank Prof. Dr. Marcel Chappin SJ (Rome) for this information. 44 Fr.H. Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher; Ein Beitrag zur Kirchen- und Literaturgeschichte, Bd. II, 1. Abteilung, Bonn 1885, p. 277, note 2. 45 The text is published in Benedictus XIV, Bullarium I, Rome 1760, pp. 251–255, P. Gasparri (ed), Codicis iuris canonici fontes I, Rome 1923, nr. 362, pp. 926–939.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 373 with three faces, or with two faces and a dove between them, as well as statues of the Trinity such as the Throne of Grace in the womb of the Virgin Mary (§ 27–28). Tolerated were the images of three more or less identical anthropomorphic gures (§ 29–31). Explicitly approved were the images of God the Father as ‘ancient of days’ as in Daniel’s vision, Christ as a human being and the Holy Spirit as a dove or as tongues of re. The Holy Trinity can be depicted vertically or horizontally as described by Capizucchi (§ 32–33). Are the papal prohibitions based on consensus? According to the literature, what Pope Benedict XIV did in his brief Sollicitudini Nostrae was nothing other than conrm with his papal authority what was already the general feeling throughout the Church and had received the approval of many Catholic writers (Bœspug, 1984, 242 and Hecht, 356–364). Some writers, such as Raynaud, might even have created the impression that there was a general consensus amongst the Catholic theologians. They referred to many others who all approved of depicting the Holy Trinity, provided certain requirements were met. It is true, that there seems to have been a consensus as regards the three-headed and three-faced Trinities. Apart from Gregory of Valencia, all Catholic writers rejected this image and realized it had given offence and provided the Protestants with good reasons for criticizing the veneration of images in the Catholic Church. What Urban VIII and Benedict XIV did by prohibiting this kind of image can be seen as putting a stop to a far-reaching laxity exploited by the proliferation of popular devotions which overstepped all bounds. But was there actually a clear consensus that it was permissible to depict the non-incarnate persons in the Trinity and the Trinity itself ? Before the Council of Trent we traced a deviating view, defended by authoritative theologians, to the effect that the Trinity cannot be depicted. Alfonse ‘el Tostado’ based this opinion on the fact that the Trinity has no corporeal delineation, Nausea on the fact that neither its unity of essence nor its trinity of persons is visible. The Council of Trent decided not to pronounce upon the issue. In later times this was ascribed to the fact that there was still a considerable difference of opinion amongst Catholic writers as regards the subject. Secondary literature suggests that after the Council there was unanimity. Apparently the more rigorous approach, rejecting images of the non-incarnate

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persons of the Trinity, had disappeared. Whether or not this was the case, however, can be questioned, as will be explained more fully. Interpretation of the decree by Councils and bishops For the academic theologians it was a challenge to interpret the Trentine decree on the veneration of saints and images; for the local bishops it was a dire necessity to see the decisions of Trent received in their dioceses. With the purpose of implementing and also further elaborating and interpreting the decisions of Trent a number of provincial councils took place, one of the earliest being the Council of Cambrai. This Council gathered from 24 June until 25 July 1565 and was presided over by archbishop Maximilian de Berghes († 1570). As regards the veneration of saints and sacred images, it only dealt with those of Christ and the saints (Mansi XXXIII, 1421) and did not mention paintings or statues of God the Father, the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity. In so doing the Council was still very much following the footsteps of Trent, leaving room for divergent opinions. The Council also phrased an important rule to be observed in the veneration of saints and images, viz. that of analogy and proportionality. This was no concrete provision or prohibition, but rather a guiding principle: the prayers of the faithful should follow the analogy and proportion of the faith. What is meant here, is that more worship is owed to what according to the Christian belief is the more important and God is more venerable than the saints. For this reason, when the unlettered visit the statues of the saints imploring their help and according to the Christian custom say the Lord’s Prayer (Our Father), they should be regarded not as addressing the saints, but as addressing God, while the saints will join them with their prayers (Mansi XXXIII, 1421). Urged by the regent Margaret of Parma (1522–1586), the Church Province of Utrecht also convened a Council (10–30 October 1565). However, it only pronounced on matters of doctrine, not on matters of discipline. Moreover, the Council had hardly any effect and its decisions were not even ofcially recorded.46 One year thereafter, the difference of opinion between Catholics and Calvinists concer ning the veneration of images became very real during an iconoclastic

46 For the Acta see J. le Plat (ed.), Monumentorum ad historiam concilii Tridentini amplissima collectio, Tom. VII–I, Louvain 1787, 101–124.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 375 outbreak in the city of Utrecht on Sunday 25 August 1566. It was not the Cathedral or the Collegiate Churches—except the Church of St. Mary which lost its statues over the main entrance—but the four Parish Churches (Assumption of the Virgin, St. James, St. Getrude and St. Nicholas) and two churches of the mendicant orders that were the targets of the Calvinists. These events as well as the fact that the decree of Trent on the veneration of images was not received in the Church Province of Utrecht, may have induced archbishop Frederick Schenk van Toutenburg (1503–1588) to publish a short treatise on the issue in 1567. But as regards the question of images of the non-incarnate persons of the Trinity, the archbishop did not say a word and only dealt with the veneration of images of Christ, the cross, of Mary and the other saints. By so doing he still left room for those who disapproved of images of the Trinity. Moreover, the treatise had a strong historical character and contained many references to the Scriptures and the church fathers. Much attention was also paid to the Second Council of Nicaea, whereas there were only a few scattered references to the decree of Trent.47 One of Frederick’s successors, the Vicar Apostolic Joannes Baptista van Neercassel (1623–1686), also dealt with the question of images, namely in his treatise on the veneration of saints and especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This work was composed in 1675 during van Neercassel’s exile. After the French had left the Northern Netherlands in 1673 van Neercassel considered it wise to leave the country for some time. From 1674 until 1678 he lived in Huissen (Duchy of Cleve). In his treatise he defended the veneration of saints and images against the criticism of the Calvinists, but at the same time he took up a position in the debate within the Catholic Church. Just as in the treatise of his predecessor Schenk van Toutenburg, not one word can be found on the images of God the Father, the Holy Spirit or the Trinity. It is inconceivable that van Neercassel was not familiar with such images. In the Parish Church of Huissen there was a painting of the Compassio Patris by Jan van Bijlert (1597/98–1671) which dated from about 1639 and was lost in 1943, a grotesque spectacle, more than life sized, showing also St. Willibrord and St. Boniface who, in full Episcopal regalia, are kissing the wounds of Christ (g. 4). Van Neercassel followed the

47 Fredericus Archiepiscopus Traiectensis, De vetustissimo sacrarum imaginum usu in ecclesia Christi catholica liber, Antwerp 1567.

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common view amongst the Catholic writers that the images should not be lascivious and always in conformity with the prototype they represent (§ CI). He also followed the principle of proportionality as formulated by the Council of Cambrai in 1565. Following this principle, according to van Neercassel, the external splendour (externus apparatus) of images should not exceed that of the Holy Sacrament (§ CIV). The underlying thought here is that according to the Catholic faith more honour is owed to God than to the saints. For van Neercassel the worship of God did not focus on the Trinity, but on the Eucharist. Images of saints should not be more precious than the tabernacle.48 As is known from his other works, van Neercassel promoted a specic kind of religious life among the faithful, which was characterised by internal piety, the correct spiritual state for receiving the sacraments, examination of personal conscience, religious knowledge and a biblical-liturgical orientation. As stated above, he did not pronounce upon images of the non-incarnate persons in the Trinity, but in view of his general approach towards religious life, it is unthinkable that he would have condemned the more rigorous view which did not approve of such images. At the same time, the devotion van Neercassel supported, was to such an extent centred around the Eucharist, that the question of depicting the Trinity could never be prominent. Hessels on images of God the Father; the more rigorous view at Port-Royal; rejecting images of the Holy Trinity ‘in the spirit of Trent’ In the Southern Netherlands and in France there were theologians who, unlike Schenk van Toutenburg and van Neercassel, did criticize the images of God the Father or of the Holy Trinity. In the sixteenth century it was the Louvain theologian Jean Hessels, mentioned above, who taught that it is not permitted to depict God the Father as being seated.49 He based this view on two arguments. The rst was derived from the Council of Elvira (305 or 306), rejecting more or less every image, not just that of the Father seated. The Council had decreed (canon 36) that there should be no images in churches. What we praise and worship should not be painted on the walls. The second argument was derived from Augustine, who maintained that we indeed believe

48 Joannes Episcopus Castoriensis, Tractatus de sanctorum et praecipue Beatissimae Virginis Mariae cultu, Utrecht 1675, §§ CI (528–531) and CIV (538). 49 Hesselius, Brevis decalogi explicatio, caput 65 (57r–57v).

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 377 that Christ is sitting at the right hand of the Father, but we should not think that God the Father is to be envisaged in a human form or that He can be said to be seated. For this reason it was not permitted to have such an image in the church.50 Although Hessels’s opinion was by no means incompatible with any ofcial doctrine of the Catholic Church, it was condemned by the Holy Ofce on 7 December 1690 as one of the misconceptions of Jansenism (Denzinger, 2325). The Roman authorities responsible for this condemnation probably did not realize that the phrasing of Hessels’s view was word for word derived from Augustine and that by condemning it, they at the same time had condemned a quotation and the teaching of a holy church father from the fourth and fth centuries (Pera, 66–72). A number of French writers from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries supported a more consistent but also more rigorous opinion than that of Hessels, namely that in general terms God the Father should not be depicted in any anthropoid form. For this reason these writers also rejected images of the Holy Trinity showing God as the ‘ancient of days’. This opinion may have had its origin in circles around the Cistercian abbey Port-Royal, reformed in 1609 by its abbess Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661), and was probably rooted not only in the constant fear of anthropomorphism, but also in the sincere belief that in religious art every image must be in conformity with the biblical facts. This premise implied that attempting to depict a theological doctrine, such as the Holy Trinity, is not without problems. After all, there is biblical evidence supporting the concept of the Holy Trinity, but there are no biblical texts describing the appearance of the Holy Trinity. In his earlier works the painter Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674) several times depicted God the Father and the Holy Trinity (Dorival, nrs. 1, 2, 4, 189, 190). In later years, however, after having developed close relations with Port-Royal, where two of his daughters were educated in the boarding school, this appears to have changed entirely. In none of Champaigne’s later paintings was God the Father or the Holy Trinity depicted, although the subjects of these paintings could certainly have lent themselves to it. A good example is the famous Ex-voto, nowadays exhibited in the Louvre, which Champaigne painted out of gratitude, when in 1662 after a novena by the community of Port-Royal (29 December 1661 until 6 January 1662), his daughter, sister

50

Augustinus, De de et symbolo, VII.14 (CSEL 41, 16–17).

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Catherine de Sainte-Suzanne (1636–1686), was miraculously healed from a paralysis of both her legs. The painting shows Agnès Arnauld (1593–1671), sister of the deceased abbess Angélique, in prayer next to the paralysed sister Catherine. In this painting Champaigne did not choose to depict God the Father or the Holy Trinity in any anthropoid form and yet God is present, albeit in a hidden way, viz. in the descending light and in the faces of the two women (Dorival, nr. 140, Marin, 1995, 299–318). The idea that a painting should be in conformity with the reality of Scripture and nature was also expressed in a letter from Martin de Barcos, abbot of Saint-Cyran (1600–1678), to a nephew of Philippe, the painter Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–1681), dating from 1674. The painter should not use his own imagination but hold to the naturalistic and historical truth.51 Moreover, he should submit himself to authentic Christian inspiration. As a consequence the image he paints becomes a ‘sign’ of the hidden truth (Marin, 1970, Menozzi, 209–212, Marin, 1997, 267–320). Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), doctor of the Sorbonne, brother of the abbess Angélique and kindred soul of a number of leading gures in Port-Royal, is said to have been engaged on a study on the veneration of the saints, especially of the Virgin Mary, and their images, during his exile in the rectory at the beguinage in Delft in the Netherlands (1679–1694), after he had been expelled from the Sorbonne. It was in this period, more specically in the years 1691–1692, that he vigorously defended the opinion of Hessels against the condemnation of the Holy Ofce, in his treatise addressed to his former friend and associate Martinus Steyaert (1647–1701). This Steyaert had, in order to secure his career at the University of Louvain, gone over to the side of the anti-Jansenists. The opinion of Arnauld was even more reserved than the one of Hessels. Arnauld taught in general terms that the opinion that no statues of God the Father be exhibited in churches, is a legitimate stand within the Catholic Church. He stated that the counter argument that this may have been a valid rule for the Church in the days of Augustine but was no longer for the contemporary Church, was an unfounded assertion. Moreover, according to Arnauld the opinion of Hessels did not clash with any ofcial doctrine of the Church.52 51 L. Goldmann (ed), Correspondance de Martin de Barcos, abbé de Saint-Cyran, Paris 1956, 407–409. 52 A. Arnauld, Difficultés, proposées à M. Steyaert, Difficulté XCVI, Huitième Différence, Cinquième preuve d’obreption propos. 25, in Oevres de Antoine Arnauld, Tom. IX, Paris 1777, 387–395.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 379 In France there were more writers inclined to reject the idea of depicting the Holy Trinity. According to the Doctrine chrétienne of François Philippe Mésenguy (1677–1763), one of the gentlemen of Port-Royal, the reason why the Council of Trent had not pronounced upon images of God the Father and the Trinity, was that there were in the Catholic Church always sensible people disapproving of depicting God the Father as human being in order to prevent the simple and ignorant from visualizing a corporeal Deity. During catechism bishop JacquesBenigne Bossuet (1627–1704) of Meaux always attached a large image to the wall related to the subject of his teaching. However, during his lessons on the Holy Trinity there was nothing to see. Mésenguy had to admit that there were some fragments in the Bible where God was said to have appeared to the prophets (Isa 6.1, Ezek 1.26, Dan 7.9 and Rev 4.2), but he considered it questionable whether these few scattered texts could justify a frequent use of images of the Deity. The Council of Trent had declared itself against images capable of evoking a false doctrine or leading the unlettered astray. Thus ‘in the spirit of the Council of Trent’ offensive images such as that of the Trinity should be repressed as much as possible.53 Conclusions In spite of the impression created by writers as Théophile Raynaud, images of the Holy Trinity have always been controversial, not only prior to the Council of Trent, but also in later times. For rejecting the monstrous three-headed and three-faced images of the Trinity there was since the sixteenth century almost unanimous support, but as regard the fundamental question whether it is permissible to depict God the Father, the Holy Spirit or the Holy Trinity there was always some discord among the Catholic theologians. After Trent a majority view emerged which was inclined to a more lax approach. Under certain conditions it was prepared to tolerate and even explicitly approve certain images of the Trinity. At the same time there were a number of writers who simply did not pronounce upon the question, when commenting on the decree of Trent on the veneration of images. These writers may not be presumed to endorse the view of Vermeulen and the majority 53 François Philippe Mésenguy, Exposition de la doctrine chrétienne ou instructions sur les principales vérités de la religion, Tom. II, Cologne 1758, 365–366.

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that depicting the Trinity was allowed. Circumstantial data sometimes even point into the opposite direction. There was also a minority within the Catholic Church which explicitly rejected the idea of depicting the Holy Trinity and presented their opinion as ‘in the spirit’ of the decree of Trent. The protagonists of this dissenting view can be encountered in circles of the Louvain Augustinism and of Port-Royal. This minority view may be qualied as rigorous in the sense that it held to the older opinion that the non-incarnate persons of the Trinity may not be depicted, because their images would reproduce in a natural and human way what is supernatural and superhuman. Images of the Trinity would, for the less-educated faithful, produce the imminent danger of anthropomorphism. This opinion, which is likely to have been shared by the writers just mentioned who did not pronounce on depicting the Trinity, is pure and sincere in its intentions, but at the same time it is elitist. It withholds from the unlettered worshipper a simple means to come to God, and demands from everyone an abstract level of thinking and contemplation in order to accept the theological teachings on the Holy Trinity without visualizing anything corporeal. Benedict XIV was inclined to make concessions and made a move which no Council and no Pope had ever made before him. He ruled explicitly, albeit in the form of a brief 54 and not as a bull or Apostolic Constitution, that the Holy Trinity can be depicted in certain ways. By so doing he followed a majority stand, albeit not a general feeling and certainly no consensus. In his disapproval of the three-headed Trinities, Benedict did not want to indulge popular devotions, but at the same time he did not want to endorse the austerity of those theologians, who rejected entirely the idea of depicting the Holy Trinity. The pastoral approach which the Roman authorities had chosen to adopt, was being tolerant towards or even explicitly approving specic traditional ways of depicting the Trinity. Apparently they did not want to make high demands to the imaginative powers of the simple faithful. This is conrmed by other historical events. It is true, the altar of the potters’ guild was removed from St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, although this kind of image was not prohibited in terms of Sollicitudini Nostrae. Similarly, in 1797 in Vienna a copper engraving of the Holy Trinity was conscated because of the fact that the Holy Spirit was

54 A brief is a papal letter concerning matters of a private nature and of less importance than those dealt with in a bull.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 381 depicted as a young man holding a dove (Wiedemann, 368–369). However, paintings of the Holy Spirit after the vision of Crescentia of Kaufbeuren are preserved to the present day. Images of the Holy Spirit in a human form continued to be created. Only three years after the brief Sollicitudini Nostrae was promulgated, Matthäus Günther (1705–1788), for example, painted a fresco for the parish church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in Altdorf (Ostallgäu), showing the Holy Spirit in a human form, dressed in a splendid festive gown of gold brocade trimmed with ermine, and surrounded by tongues of re (g. 5). This is all the more surprising, since Günther was living in Augsburg and Altdorf belonged to the diocese of Augsburg, while it was the prince-bishop of this diocese who had elicited the brief.55 Moreover, the three-faced image of the Trinity which so annoyed the Protestants, which was by general consent of all Catholic writers labelled as monstrous and which was twice prohibited by a Roman Pontiff, continued to be popular in certain regions of Central Europe such as Bavaria and the Tyrol. Paintings of this image, many behind glass, were manufactured until the nineteenth century. This may create the impression that for long a period the brief Sollicitudini Nostrae was apparently not a document which the Roman authorities insisted be observed universally. Both inside and outside church buildings much which the brief prohibited was in fact tolerated. Thus, one might expect that this pastoral attitude would leave some room also for the more rigorous view that the Holy Trinity should not be depicted at all, but this was by no means the case. The Council of Pistoia (1786–1787), presided over by bishop Scipio dei Ricci (1741–1806), decided as a part of its programme of Church Reform to exclude from the churches certain images. According to § XVII of the decree on the prayer of the Sixth Session of the Council (Mansi XXXVIII, 1074), there were three categories of images which had to be removed: (i) images presenting a false doctrine, such as the one of the Human Heart of Jesus, (ii) images which could lead the unlettered astray, and (iii) images which instead of educating were causing scandal, such as lascivious and ridiculous images, and images exuding an atmosphere of vanity and pomposity. The second category, the images

55 Only in 1928 the Holy Ofce issued a prohibition (16 March 1928), Acta Apostolicae Sedis 20 [1928], 103 against depicting the Holy Spirit in a human form, a provision which was not infrequently ignored.

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capable of causing error, included those of the inconceivable mystery of the Trinity (quella della Trinità incomprehensibile). This opinion of the Council was on 28 August 1794 condemned by the constitution Auctorem dei of Pope Pius VI (1717–1799, pope from 1775), since it was phrased generally, was ill-considered and contrary to the pious custom observed by the Church, as if there were no statues of the Trinity which were generally approved of and could be admitted without any danger (Denzinger, 2669). However, as was shown by the Louvain jurist and canonist Josse Leplat (1732–1810), according to the decree of Trent every bishop has the duty to watch over the images exhibited in the churches within the territory of his jurisdiction, especially those of the Deity. Bishops are even entitled to suppress the exposure of such images, if by lack of proper instruction they can easily lead to the dangerous misconception that the Deity is corporeal. This can be done at their own discretion, without rst having to obtain approval from Rome. Leplat even recorded a case where an image of the Holy Trinity was exhibited in a chapel. On Trinity Sunday it was visited by many faithful in the supposition that relics of the Holy Trinity were exposed there as those of saints are usually exposed.56 This brings us to our nal remarks. The prohibitions of Urban VIII and Benedict XIV may have been issued with the intention of putting a stop to certain monstrous excrescences in popular devotions. Similarly, by promulgating Sollicitudini Nostrae Benedict XIV may have had equally sincere intentions of formulating an authoritative guideline, based upon the majority stand amongst the Catholic writers. By so doing, he settled a question of iconoclash, i.e. some controversial issues related to the veneration of images, which the Council of Trent had ignored. But there is the other side of the coin. For the fundamental problem whether the non-incarnate persons of the Trinity may be depicted, i.e. the question of iconoclasm, there was no longer any room within the Catholic Church. Henceforth, the scope for adopting a critical attitude towards images of the Holy Trinity was seriously reduced. Whereas regarding images of the Holy Spirit in a human form or three-faced Trinities, the Roman authorities were inclined to turn a blind eye, at the same time they were no longer willing to tolerate within the Catholic Church the 56 Lettres d’un theologien-canoniste a N.S.P. Le Pape Pie VI, Tom. II, Brussels 1796, Lettre XVI, pp. 626–633. In a brief of 15 March 1642 Urban VIII had reserved the approbation of images with a new appearance or wearing a new kind of habit for the Holy See. See Analecta juris ponticii I, Rome 1855, 1237–1238.

19. papal prohibitions midway between rigor and laxity 383 theological opinion that the Holy Trinity should not be depicted at all, although the latter view was based on undisputed theological premises, on authoritative writers and had for many centuries been regarded as a totally legitimate stance.57 LITERATURE Bœspug, F., Dieu dans l’art; Sollicitudini nostrae de Benoît XIV (1745) et l’affaire Crescence de Kaufbeuren, Paris 1984. ———, Le diable et la trinité tricéphale; A prospos d’une pseudo-« vision de la Trinité » advenue à un novice de Saint Norbert de Xantes, in Revue des Sciences Religieuses 72 (1998), 156–175. Dorival, B., Philippe de Champaigne 1602–1674; La vie, l’œuvre, et le catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre, Vol. II, Paris 1976. Hecht, Chr., Katholische Bildertheologie im Zeitalter von Gegenreformation und Barock; Studien zu Traktaten von Johannes Molanus, Gabriele Paleotti und anderen Autoren, Berlin 1997. Jedin, H., Entstehung und Tragweite des Trienter Dekrets über die Bilderverehrung I and II, Theologische Quartalschrift 116 (1935), 143–188. Marin, L., Signe et représentation: Philippe de Champaigne et Port-Royal, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 25 (1970)/1, 1–29. ———, Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée, Paris 1995. ———, Pascal et Port-Royal, Paris 1997, IV (La question du portrait). Menozzi, D., Les images; L’Église et les arts visuels, Paris 1991. Pera, S., Historical notes concerning ten of the thirty-one rigoristic propositions condemned by Alexander VIII (1690), Rome 1960. Smith, C.R., Collectanea Antiqua; Etchings and notices of ancient remains IV, London 1857. Stemberger, G., Die Patriarchenbilder der Katakombe in der Via Latina im Lichte der jüdischen Tradition, Kairos; Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft und Theologie NF 16 (1974), 19–78. Warner, M., Alone of all her sex; The myth and cult of the Virgin Mary, London 1976. Wiedemann, Th., Die kirchliche Bücher-Censur in der Erzdiocöse Wien. Nach den Acten des fürsterzbischöichen Consistorial-Archiv in Wien III, Archiv für Österreichische Geschichte 50 (1873), 353–520.

57 I thank Prof. Dr. Franck Roumy (Université de Paris Sud), Prof. Dr. Zoltán Csepregi (Budapest), Prof. Dr. Marcel Chappin SJ (Ponticia Universitas Gregoriana) and Dr. Dick Schoon (IJmuiden) for their help and Prof. Margaret Hewett (Cape Town) for further advice and correcting the English of the text.

PART FOUR

MODERN TIMES

20. THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: PRUSSIAN MONARCHY AND ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE MAKING OF SAINTS DURING THE 19TH CENTURY Angela Berlis (Utrecht University) Introduction A bronze relief by the artist Johann Gottfried Schadow shows a woman ascending to heaven. Seven stars form a halo around her head; two women kneel one either side of her, one holding up a chalice. To her right and left two angels oat on clouds. A familiar image. But this is not a representation of the Assumption of Mary, but the ‘apotheosis of Queen Luise of Prussia’ (1811/12). In 1815, just a few years after this relief was cast, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: ‘Our age is not an age of iconoclasm, but an age which has no images.’1 Two decades earlier, Goethe had witnessed the last iconoclasm in European history, in which every sign of the feudal system was removed in the name of secularisation, including pictures alluding to religious practices.2 And yet, even as Goethe was writing these words, a new ood of images swept across the aesthetic consciousness of the nation: ‘The storm to destroy images seems to have released a veritable storm of images, an ination of images.’ (Schneider, 2001, 8). The destruction of religious and ecclesiastical images towards the end of the eighteenth century, in which many images of saints were discarded or destroyed, was paralleled by the destruction of political images and icons, culminating in the destroying of ‘the king’s holy body’ in the execution of Louis XVI (Schneider, 2001, 8). This was followed in the nineteenth century not only by the ‘return of the holy’ (Angenendt, 1997, 272–274), but also by the reestablishment of political images.

1 J.W. Goethe to Voigt, 17 February 1815. Goethes Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe), Part IV, vol. 25, 194. 2 As for example an instruction of the Cologne Municipal Government in 1798, cited by: Hinz, 1988, 111.

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One of these was the image of Queen Luise of Prussia. She became a myth in her own lifetime. After her early death in 1810 this myth took on new forms, many of which had religious elements. This development was encouraged by the Prussian monarchy throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In this article, I investigate the development of the myth of Luise and its religious connotations, arguing that Luise offers an example of the making of a secular, protestant saint. However, political aims can also be served by the making of ecclesiastical saints, as is seen in the case of the Ruthenian Archbishop Josaphat Kuncewycz and the Spanish Inquisitor Pedro de Arbués, both canonized by Pius IX in 1867. These three cases offer particularly good as illustrations of the relationship between the religious and the political. In particular, all three gures were—or were seen as—victims, either of explicit persecution or of circumstance, and this victim role was interpreted in religious terms. The politics of their representation gave all three an exaggerated religious importance which had a particular signicance for their context, whether national or ecclesiastical.3 Moreover, all three cases attracted a certain level of public interest, so that contemporary responses are available, both favourable and critical which reveal something of their signicance for contemporaries. This article considers whether these three cases are indeed comparable, or whether a clear distinction should be made between secular and ecclesiastical sainthood. In dealing with this question, each case will be considered in terms of the aims which were served by these ‘canonizations’. What did the Prussian monarchy and the (Roman) Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy hope to gain? Idols, Icons and Saints It is helpful to begin with the distinction made by Willem Frijhoff between idols, icons and saints (Frijhoff, 1998). Frijhoff argues that idols exist primarily in the minds of their followers. A fan projects an ideal

3 Nation and church are here considered as communities. On the nation as ‘imagined community’, see Anderson, 2006. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann see both nation and religious community as cultural, imagined constructs and ‘products of social imagination’, with a great social force and efcacy in everyday life. In their view, the ‘dichotomy between religion and nationalism is an ideological element in the Western discourse of modernity’. Van der Veer & Lehmann, 1999, 3.

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personality onto his idol, and the idol manifests a particular identity. Even when an idol has millions of fans, a personal relationship can exist between the idol and an individual fan, which allows the fan to draw on the energy of the idol. Examples here would include pop idols, sporting heroes and lm stars. The emergence and disappearance of idols are affected by shifting interest groups, waves of fashion and changing trends (Frijhoff, 2001, 197). It is also supported by mass media and other new means of communication, such as the Internet (Frijhoff, 2004, 4). Icons, in contrast, represent a particular value, virtue or behaviour. The term icon ‘is rapidly ceding its original meaning—a holy image—to take on a new meaning, borrowed from semiotics: a standardized model, an ideal representation, an image recognized in the life of a person who is concrete but depersonalised into an ideal-type in an up-to-date form.’ (Frijhoff, 2004, 4) While idols represent a fantasy, icons incarnate a reality, pointing to something that someone perceives to exist. In contrast to saints and idols, icons are not necessarily attractive, so that an icon may symbolise a dictatorship or may glorify violence. The lm ‘Goodbye Lenin’ (2003) includes a scene in which a statue of Lenin was removed by a crane, an explicit image of the destruction of one of the central icons of communism.4 Every group and culture has its own icons; indeed Frijhoff argues that our image of history is made up of a series of icons, such as—for the Netherlands—the murder of Boniface (representing the death pains of European paganism), or the destruction of images during the Reformation (representing the dawn of a new historical and religious age), or William of Orange, the father of the fatherland (Frijhoff, 1998, 52–67). An icon may represent different values to different ages: Anna Maria van Schuurman (1607–1678) was seen in the seventeenth century as an educated virgin, in the eighteenth century as the model of sensibility and in the nineteenth century as the image of a virtuous and devout woman (See Frijhoff, 1998, 67; cf. de Baar & Rang, 1992). Finally, saints speak and stand for themselves. Their lives symbolise transgression: ‘transgression of the natural world by marvel and miracle, transgression of taboos, norms, and values, all of which invite the

4 See for the same motif the drawing by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Project for the modication of a monument from the Communist Era (1999), in: Latour & Weibel, 2002, 105.

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faithful to imitate, imagine, or carry out such transgressions’ (Frijhoff, 2004, 13). This is a very general denition of saintliness.5 The specic characteristics of holiness will be dened by the particular (religious) community. Every community also denes for itself the religious status of holiness and, with it, saints. Finally, every community recognises a particular form of life as representing a meaningful expression of holiness. These three elements—the denition of the characteristics of holiness, the process of nominating saints and the appropriation of saints for the community—are helpful in analysing exemplary forms of life and their functions within particular communities (Frijhoff, 1998, 20). From this description it is clear that saints do not fall from heaven. Rather, a social group determines which forms of life should be considered exemplary, inspirational or specially consecrated. People who full these expectations will be recognized by those social groups as idols, icons or saints. One important aspect of Frijhoff ’s approach is that it looks beyond the individual person and her biography, to consider that person as a role model, to whom particular characteristics are attributed. It examines not achievements, but the modalities and methods of ascription (Frijhoff, 2004, 9). The process, by which someone comes to be recognized as a special person, or even as a saint, is thus the focus of attention. Queen Luise: The nineteenth century’s ‘Queen of Hearts’ What, then, were the reasons for the popularity of the ‘Queen of Hearts,’ as August Wilhelm Schlegel called Queen Luise (1776–1810)?6 Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz was born in 1776 in Hanover. In 1793 aged 17, she was taken to meet the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (1770–1840) in the Imperial City of Frankfurt, and they were married that Christmas. Judged by contemporary standards, the couple had a good marriage and Luise bore her husband ten children. A very beautiful woman, Luise was also much more communicative than her some what stiff husband, and when she became Queen of Prussia in 1797 she soon won her subjects’ hearts, becoming a legend in her own

5 For a short, theological description of sainthood from Roman Catholic and Protestant (Lutheran) view see: Communio Sanctorum, 2000, numbers 229–252. 6 Cited according to: Thiele, 2003, 194. This is the most recent biography of Luise. A selection of the many earlier biographies is listed in: ibid., 600–615.

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lifetime, and this was supported by the agents of the Prussian monarchy.7 This was the time of the Napoleonic Wars, called in German the Befreiungskriege (wars of liberation). In 1807 Luise encountered Napoleon at Tilsit and demanded the return of the town of Magdeburg, which he had just conquered. When Luise died in 1810 of pneumonia, Prussia was in chaos, its armies defeated by Napoleon’s troops, and the royal family had only recently returned to Berlin from exile. It was said by the people, that the enemy had killed the guardian angel of the people (De Bruyn, 2002, 61). The term ‘guardian angel’ expresses a religious undertone which can also be seen in works of art such as the Apotheosis described above. This was commissioned soon after Luise’s death by a wealthy subject as an expression of his grief. It was later bought by her widower, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, who had it erected in the parish church on the royal estate at Paretz. The portrayal of Luise as a saint ascending to heaven tted the Prussian people’s mourning (De Bruyn, 2002, 55–57). A century later, memories of the grief at her early death were still fresh. In 1910, Reinhold Steig wrote in the Deutsche Rundschau, a widely read German cultural journal, that the people of Berlin had experienced Luise’s death as a ‘dark cloud’ over the Prussian capital and the whole land (Steig, 1910, 267). In the night of her death, thousands of people gathered at the Royal palace, and on the following Sunday every church in Berlin was lled. When her body was carried through the Brandenburg Gate across Unter den Linden to the palace, the entire population formed a guard of honour. An ofcial memorial service was held in the (Protestant) Berliner Dom, a Catholic mass was celebrated for the Queen’s soul in the Cathedral of St Hedwig, and a secular, musical memorial by night was organised by the Catholic poet Achim von Arnim. At the close of this event, which was so successful that it had to be repeated, Luise was addressed as a patron saint, who had conquered death and lived: She lives; She watches over you; She will be your Guardian Angel!8

7 See Simon, 1999. Cited according to the internet edition: http://www.uni-koeln. de/~alk02/publ/WRJLuise.pdf (last visited 15 May 2006). 8 ‘Sie lebt, Sie wachet über euch, Wird euer Schutzgeist sein!’ Cited in: Steig, 1910, 278.

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The religious idealisation and national heroic glorication of the Queen later found its expression in the Apotheosis. It reected the emotional soul of the people. The music and poems which had been used during the night memorial were later printed and proved extremely popular. In his article, published a century after Luise’s death in 1910, Reinhold Steig describes these events as though they had taken place only a short time before. Luise’s death, the people’s mourning, and their honour for her memory have the character of present events.9 The myth of Luise was bound up with the production of an image, ‘which sought her equal.’10 This myth should be understood—in accordance with Jan and Aleida Assmann’s definition—as an element of the ‘cultural memory’ of nineteenth-century Prussia ( J. Assmann, 1999; A. Assmann 1999). In order to understand this cultural memory, visual images must be considered alongside written and literary witnesses, for pictures also inuence the development and sustaining of historical myths, complementing the witness of words (cf. Simon, 1999, 3). A study of images of Luise indicates that the Prussian royal family consciously sought to present a particular image of her. Luise was recreated as a cult object, and in this way became a part of social discourse (cf. Simon, 1999, 4). The way Luise was perceived altered with time. Soon after her marriage to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm in December 1793, King Friedrich Wilhelm II commissioned a double statue of the Princesses Luise and Friederike (1778–1841) from the court sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850). In contrast to the contemporary trend for depictions of royal personages, Schadow’s sculpture gives no hint of the position for which the future Queen was destined. This is a work which ‘reproduces nature’: the beauty and modesty of the sculpture’s subjects is intended to reveal their inner character. This is an expression of contemporary philosophy of art, but it must also be seen against the political and social background. Only a few years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, which provoked great sympathy in bourgeois circles in Germany, the Prussian royal family was careful to emphasise

9 The description reminds the reader of the national mourning and rituals which in recent years become normal after the death of a well-known gure. Only the form of the ritual repertoire is different: instead of today’s seas of owers, Queen Luise was honoured by seas of poetic and musical owers. 10 Simon, 1999, 2. Compare also the funeral of the rst Queen of Prussia in 1705: Gundermann, 2005. Cf. also Schulte, 2002.

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its afnity with the bourgeoisie. Porcelain copies of the double statue were mass produced and proved popular amongst the Prussian people. The statue aimed to support the Prussian political status quo. However, in 1789 Luise’s sister Friederike fell from grace when, after the death of her rst husband, Louis, the brother of the king, she married a man of a lower class and was deprived of her royal title in consequence. The reproduction of this sculpture was then forbidden. Nevertheless, it had set the tone: later representations by other artists or popular images of Luise used the same bourgeois motifs in her clothing and her head covering which emphasised her membership of that class whilst allowing her to shape its fashions. This afnity to the bourgeoisie was consciously exploited during the wars against Napoleon. The royal family became a role model for the bourgeois family. After her death, Luise came to be seen as Prussian’s guardian angel, and was compared with the Virgin Mary. This is clear in the hymn of lament by Zacharias Werner, who later converted to Catholicism and became a priest: (. . .) Luisa, you, the pure, than you no-one nearer the Queen of heaven, no-one more her equal in honour and pain.11

‘Our saint is in heaven now,’ Field Marshall General Blücher is supposed to have said. There are many examples of Christian topoi being used to refer to Luise. They demonstrated the interrelationships between word and image. The memorial by night, described above, played an important role in the depiction of Luise’s apotheosis. Religion and politics are woven into another. Luise’s apotheosis must be seen against the backdrop of the Prussian political situation: humiliated and close to defeat. After Luise’s son Wilhelm (1797–1888) became Emperor of Germany in 1871, the honouring of her memory took further on mariological elements. Luise was Prussia’s mater dolorosa, depicted as a Prussian Madonna or as an angel.12 11 ‘(. . .) Luisa, Du, die Reine, / Wie mehr wie Du wohl Keine, / Der Himmelsköniginnen An Huld und Qualen gleich’. ‘Werner’s Klagen um seine Königin Louisa von Preußen (Rom, den 4. August 1810)’, in: Werner, 1970, 24–26. On Werner, see: Demandt, 2003, 285. 12 For this image, created in 1897 by Fritz Schaper cf. De Bruyn, 2002, 84. Luise

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Even the fall of the German Empire could not dim her star. During the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), she was seen primarily as a loyal loving wife and mother. Here the cult of Luise continued without any direction from above. There are various reasons why the myth of Luise disappeared in the mid-twentieth century. First, Prussia was not of great signicance in the young Federal Republic. Additionally, and more importantly, Germany was trying to distance itself from Prussian military associations. In the wars against Napoleon and later in the Empire, Luise had helped to unite rst the Prussian and later, after 1870, the German nation and to reinforce their identity.13 With the disappearance of the political constellation, the binding element lost is purpose. Finally, with the changes in the role of women in the 1960s, the image of womanhood associated with Luise has become irrelevant. With this change of values, Luise could no longer function as a secular saint or icon. Reunication and the declaration of Berlin as the capital of Germany could change this by demanding a new understanding of the history of Prussia, in which Luise might have a role to play as diplomat and peace maker. It is notable that the most recent biography of Luise, published in 2003, closes with the words: ‘The memory of Queen Luise does not die.’ (Thiele, 2003, 598). Canonization as a political instrument: Josaphat Kuncewycz and Pedro de Arbués Luise offers an example of a politics of representation with strong religious overtones, but which was initiated by the state. We now turn to two examples of a politics of representation which was initiated by the Church but which had strong political overtones. Pius IX ‘completed more beatications and canonizations than any of his predecessors,’ as the Church Historian Johann Baptist Alzog (1808–1878) was already noting in the nineteenth century.14 Pius IX was not the rst Pope to use canonization as a political instrument. He used it as a means of

holds her son Wilhelm in her arms. For the picture ‘Königin Luise als Engelsbild im Ring der Ewigkeit’, see ibid., 90. 13 The nation was frequently represented in images or in words by female gures (whether allegorical or historical), quite independently of the actual political rights of real women. See Blom, Hagemann, Hall, 2000; Förster, 2005, 94–95. 14 Cited in Nippold, 1883, 124.

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sanctioning his ecclesiastical politics and practice of piety, and also his claim to primacy (Samerski, 2002, 134). A canonization could be made to serve a number of (church) political ends, as can be seen in the cases of the Archbishop of the Uniate Church of Ruthenia, Josaphat Kuncewycz (ca. 1580–1623), and the Spanish Inquisitor Pedro de Arbués (ca. 1441–1485). Together with others, they were canonized in 1867, when the 1800th anniversary of the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul was marked. The political aspects of these procedures did not go unremarked by contemporaries, such as the Protestant church historian and co-founder of the liberal Protestant Federation, Friedrich Nippold (1838–1918).15 Nippold was very familiar with the cult of Luise (Nippold, 1889–1890, vol. 2, 72). We will consider the life of Josaphat Kuncewycz and the motives for his canonisation before turning to the case of Pedro de Arbués. The canonisation of de Arbués attracted more contemporary criticism and will be considered at greater length. Little is known of Josaphat Kuncewycz’s background.16 He may have been of Ukrainian descent; however, it seems more likely that he had Polish antecedents. He was baptized in the Orthodox Church and given the name John. In 1595, the province of ‘Kiev and all Ruthenia’ was translated to the Catholic Church, keeping its Slavic Byzantine Rite. John joined the Uniate Church and became a member of the Order of St Basil, receiving the name Josaphat. In 1609, he was ordained priest and soon became renowned as a gifted preacher, proclaiming the Union to Catholics and Orthodox alike, and hated by his former Church as a ‘robber of souls,’ a tribute to the success of his mission. He became Archimandrite of Vilnius in 1614, coadjutor to the Archbishop of Polozk, Vitebsk and Mstystaw in 1617, and nally in 1618 Archbishop of Polozk. As Archbishop his inuence became even more extensive, and he began to compose works in support of the Uniate Church (for instance a Catechism). In 1620, Moscow placed the whole Province of Kiev under Orthodox pastoral jurisdiction, leading to an escalation of tension. On 12 November 1623, whilst on a pastoral visit in Vitebsk, Josaphat was set upon by a mob, brutally tortured, and murdered. The effect of his murder was the opposite to that intended: when his martyrdom

15 16

Nippold, 1883, 124. For the ‘Evangelischer Bund’ see Müller-Dreier, 1998. For the following, see: Samerski, 2002, 138–143; Unger-Dreiling, 1960.

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became known, many Orthodox Christians joined the Uniate Church. The cult of Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr spread through Lithuania, promoted in particular by the Society of Jesus. Lithuanians and Poles sought to have Josaphat beatied; this took place on 16 May 1643. However his canonization was delayed, not least for political reasons. In 1772 the rst partition of Poland took place, and the Ruthenians together with the Archdiocese of Polozk fell under the jurisdiction of the Russian Tsar. Josaphat’s memory lived on and he was honoured locally as the Martyr of the Uniate Church. In 1860, the process of canonization was reopened at the request of a Basilian priest, Michael Dombrovskyj. Dombrovskyj wished to draw attention to the situation of the Ruthenians under Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881), who had subjected the Uniate and Latin Churches to massive restrictions, much to the displeasure of the Pope. As shown by Samerski, Josaphat’s canonization was unusual both for its speed and for the frequent interventions by Pope Pius IX (Samerski, 2002, 145). From its ofcial reopening to the pronouncing of the decretal Super tuto, the process took only fteen months,17 and was based primarily on seventeenth-century documents. To put it somewhat crudely: Josaphat (and with him Pedro de Arbués, whose case I discuss below) was taken out of the mothballs of history and canonized at top speed. In the process one particular—and novel—aspect was emphasised: Josaphat had given his life ‘to defend not only Catholic religion, but also the primacy of the Roman Church.’18 This interpretation appears as a marginal comment in a seventeenth-century plea for Josaphat’s canonization, but the association of Josaphat’s martyrdom with the defence of the Holy See was taken up and developed further by the promotor dei (Pietro Minetti) and the Dean of the Rota Romana. Josaphat thus came to be understood not only as the Apostle of the Uniate Church, but also as the champion of the Roman Primacy. This new, Roman, interpretation of Josaphat soon gained wide support. The case of Josaphat turned out to be useful not only in terms of ecclesiastical politics, but because it could serve as a political instrument

17 However, that of Pedro de Arbués was even faster, taking only three months. Cf. Samerski, 2002, 393. 18 Cited according to Samerski, 2002, 147.

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in the struggle against Russia and the Orthodox Church. Moreover, it was possible to draw a parallel between the situation of the Ruthenians in the Russian Empire and that of the Vatican. The former were oppressed by the Russians as Uniate Christians; the latter was under threat from the risorgimento (the politicial movement for the unication) in Italy. In 1862, the Papal State was restricted to the Latium region. In November 1866 the French pulled out of the Papal State, precipitating the nal decline of the patrimonium Petri. Confronted by a shrinking political arena, the Pope sought to buttress his papal claims. The causa Josaphat suited the Pope’s political and ecclesiastical interests: politically against the Tsar ( Josaphat, the Pole who was murdered by Russians) and ecclesiastically in support of his own position ( Josaphat, who died for the Primacy of the Pope). In the Russian part of Poland, the prospect of the canonization of Josaphat in 1867 resulted in the imposition of further restrictions by the Russians: four Basilian monasteries were closed, the use of Polish in Ruthenian services was forbidden, with Russian imposed instead; and clergy loyal to the Uniate Church were expelled. At the same time, the international press also criticised the move to canonize Josaphat, accusing him of extremely harsh treatment of those of other faiths (cf. Samerski, 2002, 150). There can be no doubt that this canonization bore the personal signature of Pius IX, ‘who reinterpreted the forgotten causa to serve his own church political interests and despite all resistance used the process in the service of his ends.’ (Samerski, 2002, 156). Let us consider Pedro de Arbués, who was canonised together with Josaphat. Pedro de Arbués was born in about 1441 in Epila (Aragón), studied law and theology in Spain and, from 1468, at the Spanish College in Bologna, where, after receiving his doctorate in 1473, he was appointed Professor of Theology. In 1476 he was made a Canon of Zaragoza, and in 1484 Tomás de Torquemada appointed him leader of the newly established Inquisition in Aragón, where there were many conversos, that is, forcibly baptized Jews (marranos) and Muslims (moriscos). The Inquisition was directed primarily at the conversos. On 15 September 1485, de Arbués was stabbed by conspirators at the altar steps during matins; he died two days later. The group of conspirators included members of the nobility of Aragón who had Jewish ancestors. Once again, the murder achieved the opposite of what the conspirators had hoped: the punishment of the murderers effectively destroyed resistance to the Inquisition in Aragón. A few years later the Jews were expelled form Spain. Pedro de Arbués was beatied in 1664, after a whole series

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of Spanish kings and others had made representations on his behalf. The causa then rested for two centuries.19 The process eventually led to the canonization of de Arbués seems to have been initiated by the curia. As in the case of Josaphat, history took on a life of its own. The question of who lay behind the conspiracy against de Arbués could not be answered at the time of his murder. In the decretal Super tuto the Jews were held accountable and Arbués took on Christ-like qualities: like Christ, he had been betrayed for money and died for his people, thereby preserving the purity of true teaching. In 1866, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Rites proclaimed that ‘Almighty God, in His wise Providence, chose that the Catholic Church should triumph once more over the Jews.’20 The polemics against the Jews was not only directed at the Jews themselves, but also against Liberalism and the Freemasons, both of which Pius IX thought had been inltrated by Jews. As Samerski shows, in this way the causa Arbués allowed the Vatican to take its revenge on those whom it held responsible for the risorgimento (cf. Samerski, 2002, 169). He concludes that a causa has rarely ‘been associated so nonchalantly, effectively and unconditionally with the ecclesiastical political programme of a ponticate.’ (Samerski, 2002, 169). Critical responses to the canonizations of 1867 That the nal declaration of canonization was somewhat more restrained was in large part a result of the criticism attracted by the case of de Arbués. On 19 February 1867, the Munich Church Historian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890) wrote to Lord Acton (1834–1902): ‘Why are the Bishops from the whole world being called to Rome just to celebrate canonizations? This never used to happen, so it is quite extraordinary. And what canonizations? At the height of the Inquisition, a Spanish Inquisitor, d’Arbués, was killed by people he had driven to

19 See for Arbués: Samerski, 2002, 156–169; Hoffmann, 1878, vol. I, 281–302; Pérez, 2006, 33–34. Another Inquisitor, the Dominican Peter of Verona (born ca. 1204, also known as Peter Martyr or Peter of Milan) proceeded against the Cathars. He was canonized by Pope Innocent IV only a year after his violent death in 1252. See BBKL VII (1994), cols. 371–372. Soon after his death, Pedro de Arbués began to be seen as a Western counterpart to the ‘Eastern’ Peter. See Hoffmann, 1878, vol. I, 290. 20 Cited according to Samerski, 2002, 168.

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despair (in about 1485), and now he is to be canonized as a martyr (for the Inquisition). One can only be astounded at this wanton challenge to public opinion.’21 Döllinger went on to publish a series of articles in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in 1867 describing de Arbués as ‘the merciless Inquisitor,’ (von Döllinger, 1890, 287) and arguing he had been murdered not for his faith but for his brutal acts. Döllinger was particularly concerned about the lack of historical evidence for such an assessment of the Inquisitor of Aragón and opposed the interpretation of his murder as a witness for faith, that is as martyrdom,22 seeing in the canonization of de Arbués the seeds of papal infallibility (cf. von Döllinger, 1890, 291) and the canonization of the Inquisition. One month after the canonization of Pedro de Arbués, Döllinger wrote to the Bonn scholar Franz Heinrich Reusch (1825–1900), another critic of it:23 The complications at the centre of the Church become, it seems to me, ever greater, the odium theologicum ever more intense—Arbués and the Canonization of the Inquisition—papal infallibility alongside concilium— fruits of the Syllabus etc. and besides all that the obvious growth in the political power of Protestantism—what states of affairs, what events lie before us? I nd no Ariadne’s thread through this maze.24

Although his articles in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung are not explicitly concerned with the theme of sainthood, Döllinger nonetheless denes the qualities and characteristics of a saint: Even if Arbués was indeed, as

21 Warum hat man denn schon wieder die Bischöfe der ganzen Welt zu bloßen Canonisationsfeierlichkeiten nach Rom zu rufen? Da dieß in früheren Zeiten nicht geschah, so hat die Sache etwas Auffallendes. Und welche Canonisationen? Da ist ein Spanischer Inquisitor, d’Arbues, in der Zeit der größten Härte des Verfahrens von den zur Verzweiung getriebenen Leuten (um 1485) erschlagen worden, und der soll nun als Märtyrer (der Inquisition) kanonisirt werden. Man kann nur staunen über dieses muthwillige Herausfordern der öffentlichen Meinung.’ Ignaz von Döllinger to Lord Acton, [Munich] 19 February 1867, in: Döllinger, 1963–1971, vol. 1, 476. 22 Cf. von Döllinger, 1890, 290. Döllinger bases his denition of martyrdom on Benedict XIV and his work De beaticatione. 23 This is clear from Reusch’s critical discussion of an anti-semitic book, in which the author dates the canonization of P. de Arbués to 1865. See: Theologisches LiteraturBlatt 1 (1866), Col. 218–219, here 219. 24 ‚Die Verwicklungen im Innern der Kirche werden, scheint es, immer größer, das odium theologicum immer intensiver—Arbues u[nd] Canonisirung der Inquisition—päpstliche Infallibilität nebst Concilium—Früchte des Syllabus etc. und dazu die offenbar steigende politische Macht des Protestantismus—welchen Zuständen und Ereignissen gehen wir entgegen? Ich habe keinen Ariadnefaden in diesem Labyrinth.’ Ignaz von Döllinger to Franz Heinrich Reusch, 29 July 1867, Diocesan Archive of the Catholic Diocese of the Old Catholics, Bonn. Transcription by H. Huppertz.

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the supporters of his canonization maintained, a devout, virtuous man, observant of the rules of his order and his religious duties, nonetheless he failed morally, for he sent people whose behaviour would now ‘not merit even the mildest rebuke in the confessional’ (von Döllinger, 1890, 355) to the torture chamber and to the stake, and made the lives of many people hell in order to ll the king’s coffers. Saintliness and holiness are the attributes of a person who ‘is lled by gospel piety and led in all his doings by the motives of God and neighbour.’ (von Döllinger, 1890, 356). The painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874) who lived in Munich also became involved in the debate about Pedro de Arbués. Kaulbach ‘discharged his holy anger’ (von Ostini, 1906, 111) about the canonization by drawing a charcoal mural on an empty wall in his studio: ‘Pedro de Arbués has a Jewish family burned for their faith.’ The work drew an enormous public: ‘People made pilgrimages to the studio; a barrier had to be built in front of the picture and the police were called.’ (Dürck-Kaulbach, 1921, 91) The painter received threatening letters, but also a great deal of support.25 The canonizations of 1867 saw not only Josaphat and Pedro de Arbués but also the nineteen martyrs of Gorkum proclaimed saints. In declaring them saints, Pius IX was aware that they might well provoke an outcry, both confessionally and internationally. By honouring the martyrs of Gorkum only about a decade after the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Netherlands (1853) he made a clear statement against Protestantism.26 Josaphat was useful as a tool in the struggle against the Tsar and in establishing the superiority of the Roman Church over the Orthodox. Pedro de Arbués served the rejection of Liberalism and of freemasonry, which Pius IX thought was inltrated by Jews. Without thought for the consequences, anti-Semitic

25

The copy printed in this volume is a sketch made later by Kaulbach, taken from von Ostini, 1906, 105 (plate 118). I was unable to nd a reproduction of the oil painting based on the charcoal mural of 1870. This painting is privately owned. See the list of Kaulbach’s works in: Friedrich von Boetticher, 1895, 691. With thanks to Dr. Elisabeth Stürmer, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München, and Dr. Elisabeth Kümmel, Kaulbach-Museum Bad Arolsen, for the information (May 2006). 26 In 1572 eighteen monks and priests and one layman were attacked and murdered by Protestants in Gorkum, in the Netherlands. They were beatied in 1675. Their canonization could be seen as an attack on the national honour of the Dutch and of their royal family, as the internuntius made clear to Rome. See de Valk, 1998, 163–164; cf. Samerski, 2002.

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tendencies in Rome were thus strengthened. Moreover, both these latter causae could be used in support of the primacy of the Pope. It is signicant that all these cases are interpreted in terms of martyrdom for the faith, which indeed is characteristic of the papacy of Pius IX (cf. Samerski, 2002, 396). This is no coincidence. As Michel de Certeau has shown, when a group is threatened, martyrdom increases in meaning (de Certeau, 1988, 273). By canonizing these long-forgotten martyrs, Pius IX could demonstrate the power and the victory of faith. These canonizations therefore underscore other, written statements of Pius IX’s interests, such as the Syllabus (1864), in which he denounced the Zeitgeist. His politics of canonization—and thus of representation—hold up a mirror to his ecclesiastical politics. It should therefore not surprise us that a few years later, in 1870, the critics of the canonizations of de Arbués and Josaphat were also amongst the opponents of the First Vatican Council, which made dogma of the Primacy of the Papal Jurisdiction and his Infallibility.27 Prussian and Roman Catholic Politics of Representation: A Comparison In this article, the ‘politics of representation’ has been understood as intentional propaganda for images of exemplary persons, with the intention of making public use of these constructed images to bolster the identity of those who are engaging in such politics. Looked at in this way, there is no difference between the Prussian politics of representing Luise and the politics of canonization practised by Pius IX. Both sought to strengthen their own identity by giving it a transcendental quality through the sacralising of objects of holiness. The glorication of Luise, to the extent of representing her apotheosis with the help of traditional Christian motifs, is equivalent to the raising of Josaphat and Pedro de Arbués to the company of the saints. In this process, their actual achievements are less important than those ascribed to them. Indeed, in the canonization of those considered here, their historical lives and work were consciously excluded in favour of the legends about them. All three became icons of a particular national or confessional alignment. That a Protestant royal house should create a

27 As for example Döllinger, Reusch, Lord Acton, but also the Prefect of the Vatican Archives, Augustin Theiner (1804–1874), cf. Samerski, 2002, 152.

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saint is not particularly surprising, since Protestantism also has a place for holy people as role models (Exalto, 2005; Communio Sanctorum, nr. 238). What, however, is surprising is the central use of motifs which are generally regarded as ‘catholic’. Luise, the mother of the nation, and as such its incarnation, takes on aspects of Mary.28 The denition of identity is expressed to the outside world by means of a clear demarcation. In the case of the two Roman Catholic saints, this involves the recognition and acceptance of the Inquisition (and thus of a particular aspect of the church’s own history) and the rejection of all that challenges a particular view of the church, resulting in antiliberalism, anti-semitism, anti-Orthodoxy. In the Prussian case, Luise is used to dene one nation against another: Luise against Napoleon, Germany against France (both seen allegorically in terms of female gures: Germania against Marianne, whereby the latter like Luise, takes the form of a real, mortal woman). A historical coincidence further strengthened the myth of Luise when the French initiated the FrankoPrussian war of 1870–71 by declaring war on Prussia on 19 July 1870, the 60th anniversary of her death (cf. Demandt, 2003, 336). Before King Wilhelm I (later the German Emperor) departed for the battleeld against France, he went to his mother’s grave to ask for strength. The role models serve purposes not only of demarcation but of internal cohesion; they are agents holding together nation or church. Here it seems irrelevant whether the gure is a secular or an ecclesiastical saint. What is important is that the role model reects or partakes of the group’s own interests and concerns. Finally, it may be noticed that in all these cases, the cause of the ‘saint’, whether Luise or Josaphat and Pedro de Arbués, was promoted during a time of crisis. Returning to Frijhoff ’s denition, it will be observed that none of these gures is a saint in the true sense of the word. Instead, they are icons which are able to symbolise particular contemporary values. Whilst Luise is a contemporary gure who had already become a myth during her own lifetime, Josapahat and Pedro de Arbués are gures drawn from the past. This must be understood as a conscious attempt to make use of the myth of the ‘good old days’, when the struggle against those of other confessions or faiths (and thus ‘the other’) led people to lay down their lives. The function of such saints was to act as role models

28 In artistic representations she also takes aspects of antique goddesses such as Venus.

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in similar contemporary struggles. At the same time, the gure of the saint (or, rather say, the icon) served to create or underscore faith in this version of history. Here it is important to appreciate the relationship between image and social group. Without massive support or propaganda on the part of the Prussian royal house or of Pope Pius IX, Luise, Josaphat and Pedro de Arbués would never have had the effect that they did. Those who criticized the formation and explicit use of these myths could not prevail against their power, for instance in the case of Luise the poet Theodore Fontane and the German empress Viktoria (‘Kaiserin Friedrich’);29 or in the cases of Josaphat and Pedro de Arbués, Ignaz von Döllinger and the painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Luise’s power clearly lasted much longer than that of the two ecclesiastical saints. In the end, however, their actual achievements played a more important role than any ascription of sanctity. Today, it would be difcult, if not impossible, to accept as saints the prophet of such a strange ecumenism as Josaphat’s (unity with an iron st) or an inquisitor like Pedro de Arbués. The canonization of de Arbués is probably harder to swallow than that of Josaphat, perhaps because many people have instant and negative associations with the Inquisition (even in the 19th century he was not added to the Calendar of any Germany Diocese [Hoffmann, 1878, vol. 1, 281]), whilst Josaphat’s missionary methods are less well known. Today these two saints have at the most a local signicance. At the time, the three ‘canonisations’ performed different functions. Luise served to construct and support the national identity of a modern nation which was in the process of establishing itself. Her life, her suffering and her ‘patience’ were seen as standing for those of the people. The primary addressees of the myth of Luise—who were also its supporters—were the Protestant Bildungsbürgertum (cf. Förster, 2004, 304). The canonisations of 1867 drew on the martyr-heroes of the past to defend the Roman-Catholic Church against modernism by reading their lives through the lens of nineteenth century ecclesiastical politics. In circles of the liberal catholic bourgeoisie and intellectual elite they found hardly any support. Today’s beatications and canonizations seek to strengthen other interests, some of which are still viewed as unacceptable by members of the Church and even of other faith. For instance the beatication

29

Cf. Demandt, 2003, 452–453. See also Wülng, 2005, 145–174.

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of Pius IX himself, in 2000, which was not greeted with much joy by Church Historians, Jews and Ecumenists (Berlis, 2003). Here too, interests of ecclesiastical politics and identity played an important role. Translation: Dr Charlotte Methuen LITERATURE Anderson, B., Imagined Communities. Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London-New York, 2006 (rst edition 1983). Angenendt, A., Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom frühen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart, München, 1997 (second edition). Assmann, A., Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, München, 1999. Assmann, J., Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, München, 1999 (rst edition 1997). Baar, M. de, Rang, B., ‘Minerva of savante, heilige of dweepster. Receptiegeschiedenis van Anna Maria van Schurman sedert de zeventiende eeuw’, in: M. de Baar, M. Löwensteyn, M. Monteiro & A. Sneller (eds), Anna Maria van Schuurman (1607–1678). Een uitzonderlijk geleerde vrouw, Zutphen, 1992, 9–28. Berlis, A., ‘Een hemel vol heiligen: voor elk wat wils. Over kerkelijke helden en seculiere sterren’, in: M. Kalsky, B. Leijnse, L. Oosterveen (eds), Het heil op de hielen. Over de belofte van het vervulde leven, Nijmegen-Zoetermeer, 2003, 11–28 (DSTScahier 11). Blom, I., Hagemann, K., Hall, C. (eds), Gendered Nations. Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, Oxford-New York, 2000. Boetticher, F. von, Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Hofheim/Taunus, 1895, vol. 1. Bruyn, G. de, Preußens Luise. Vom Entstehen und Vergehen einer Legende, Berlin, 2002. Certeau, M. de, The Writing of History, New York, 1988 Communio Sanctorum. Die Kirche als Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, Bilaterale Arbeitsgruppe der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz und der Kirchenleitung der Vereinigten EvangelischLutherischen Kirche Deutschlands, Paderborn-Frankfurt 2000. Demandt, Ph., Luisenkult. Die Unsterblichkeit der Königin von Preußen, Köln-Weimar-Wien, 2003. Döllinger, I. von, Briefwechsel mit Lord Acton, München 1963–1971, 3 vols. Döllinger, J.J. von, ‘Rom und die Inquisition’, in: id., Kleinere Schriften, gedruckte und ungedruckte. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von F.H. Reusch, Stuttgart, 1890, 286–356. Dürck-Kaulbach, J., Erinnerungen an Wilhelm von Kaulbach und sein Haus mit Briefen und hundertsechzig Abbildungen, München, 1921 (third edition). Exalto, J., Gereformeerde heiligen. De religieuze exempeltraditie in vroegmodern Nederland, Nijmegen, 2005. Förster, B., ‘Das Leiden der Königin als Überwindung der Niederlage. Zur Darstellung von Flucht und Exil Luise von Preußens von 1870/71 bis 1933’, in: H. Carl et al. (eds), Kriegsniederlagen. Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen, Berlin, 2004, 299–312. Förster, B., ‘Gender und Nation. Die medialen Repräsentationen der Königin Luise von Preußen 1860–1960’, in: E. Cheauré, R. Nohejl, A. Napp (eds), Vater Rhein und Mutter Wolga, Diskurse um Nation und Gender in Deutschland und Russland, Würzburg, 2005, 92–102.

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Frijhoff, W., ‘Bedevaart, heiligheid, sacraliteit: op weg naar een nieuw historisch onderzoeksprogramma’, in: P. Post, L. van Tongeren (eds), Devotioneel ritueel. Heiligen en wonderen, bedevaarten en pelgrimages in verleden en heden, Kampen, 2001, 183–202. ———, ‘Witnesses to the Other: Incarnate Longings—Saints and Heroes, Idols and Models’, in Studia Liturgica 34 (2004), 1–25. ———, Heiligen, idolen, iconen, Nijmegen, 1998. Gundermann, I., ‘Tod und Bestattung der Königin Sophie Charlotte von Preußen’, in: Der Bär von Berlin. Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, Berlin, 2005, 35–50. Hinz, B., ‘Säkularisation als verwerteter “Bildersturm”. Zum Prozeß der Aneignung der Kunst durch die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft’, in: M. Wanke (ed.), Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks, Frankfurt, 1988, 108–120. Hoffmann, F., Geschichte der Inquisition. Einrichtung und Thätigkeit derselben in Spanien, Portugal, Italien, den Niederlanden, Frankreich, Deutschland, Süd-Amerika, Indien und China. 2 vols., Bonn, 1878, 281–302. Latour, B., Weibel P. (eds), Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Karlsruhe, 2002. Müller-Dreier, A., Konfession in Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur des Kaiserreichs. Der Evangelische Bund 1886–1914, Gütersloh, 1998. Nippold, F. (ed.), Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Generalfeldmarschalls Hermann von Boyen. Aus seinem Nachlaß, 3 vols., Leipzig, 1889–1890. ———, Geschichte des Katholizismus seit der Restauration des Papstthums, Elberfeld, 1883 (Handbuch der neuesten Kirchengeschichte 2) (third revised edition). Ostini, F. von, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Bielefeld-Leipzig, 1906. Pérez, J., The Spanish Inquisition, London, 2006. Samerski, S., ‘Wie im Himmel, so auf Erden’? Selig- und Heiligsprechung in der Katholischen Kirche 1740 bis 1870, Stuttgart, 2002, 134 (Münchener Kirchenhistorische Studien 10). Schneider, H.J. ‘Vorwort’, in: H.J. Schneider, R. Simon & Th. Wirtz (eds), Bildersturm und Bilderut um 1800. Zur schwierigen Anschaulichkeit der Moderne, Bielefeld, 2001, 7–17. Schulte, R., (ed.), Der Körper der Königin. Geschlecht und Herrschaft in der höschen Welt seit 1500, Frankfurt-New York, 2002. Simon, H., ‘Die Bildpolitik des preußischen Königshauses im 19. Jahrhundert. Zur Ikonographie der preußischen Königin Luise (1776–1810)’, in Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch 60 (1999), 231–262. Steig, R., ‘Berlin in Trauer um die Königin Luise. Eine Hundertjahrs-Erinnerung’, in Deutsche Rundschau (1910) 144, 264–282. Thiele, J., Luise, Königin von Preussen. Das Buch ihres Lebens, München, 2003. Unger-Dreiling, E., Josafat. Vorkämpfer und Märtyrer für die Einheit der Christen, WienHeidelberg, 1960. Valk, J.P. de, Roomser dan de paus? Studies over de betrekkingen tussen de Heilige stoel en het Nederlands katholicisme 1815–1940, Nijmegen, 1998. Veer, P. van der, Lehmann, H., ‘Introduction’, in: P. van der Veer, H. Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion. Perspectives on Europe and Asia, Princeton, 1999, 3–14. Werner, Z., Gesammelte Werke, Bern, 1970 (24–26). Wülng, W., ‘Zum Mythos der „deutschen Frau“: Rahelbettinacharlotte vs. Luise von Preußen’, in: K. Knabel, D. Rieger, St. Wodianka (eds), Nationale Mythen— kollektive Symbole. Funktionen, Konstruktionen und Medien der Erinnerung, Göttingen 2005, 145–174.

21. CHRIST, ART AND THE NATION. THE BERLIN ‘CHRIST EXHIBITION’ OF 1896 AND THE SEARCH FOR A PROTESTANT IDENTITY IN WILHELMINIAN GERMANY Christopher König (Kampen Theological University) Introduction At the turn of the 20th century, German Protestants contributed to a complex, controversial, sometimes even polemical debate on visual arts. They controversially discussed what actually could be considered as Protestant art, and if so, how this art could be related to Protestant beliefs, religious practise and culture. This controversy becomes only understandable in context with the growing tensions within theology, church and society in Wilhelminian Germany, even though not all contemporary contributions to the problem referred to this background explicitly. The discussions about styles, formal problems and artistic programmes represented merely the surface of a far-reaching cultural debate. Theologians and artist set the tone of the discussion, but increasingly public lectures on religious art and specialist journals were able to gather an audience that consisted of teachers, intellectuals and interested laymen. The debate on art and religion played a crucial part in creating modern Protestant identity and in negotiating a German national culture that visibly was determined by Protestantism. Visual arts mirror the Zeitgeist more clearly than any other sphere of cultural production, the respected art critic Karl Schefer claimed after the turn of the century (Schefer, 1901, 426). The pastor Gustav Lasch concurred with this judgement: A work of art must be considered as a condensation of the yearning of his contemporaries by the artist, since he ‘partakes in his time and its mentalities’ (Lasch, 1904, 348f.). These remarks reect the great importance that was attached to art and art appraisal among the educated in Wilhelminian Germany. Painting and architecture, to a lesser degree also sculpture, were given a central position as reecting national progress and as sharpening cultural self-awareness. In research into modern religious history, visual sources have rather been marginalised. The maelstrom of images in

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context of religion, which often aimed at the demands of a broader audience than representedly the artistic avant-garde, was disregarded as crude ‘Gebrauchskunst’. This paper singles out the Berlin exhibition ‘Das Christusideal in der deutschen Kunst’ of 1896 as an exemplary endeavour that rooted in debates promoting an artistic renewal. The exhibition is worth noting because it was designed to amalgamate the search for a religious and national future. Aiming at a liberal, cultural-Protestant public, it was deliberately organised opposing artistic convention and calling for a fundamental reorientation of religious values. The arrangement of the exposition, the shown images and the resulting debate provide interesting source material on the complex use of art and images in n-de-siècle Protestantism. The symbolic forms of communication, by which religious debate in the Kaiserreich negotiated the fundamentals of cultural and ethical norms as well as the deep rifts that divided liberal and traditional Protestants become palpable in the discussion of the presented images. As Peter Burke has demonstrated, the recent discussion about visual culture has virtually turned from the impact of ideas, mentalities to attitudes to images to ‘the effect of images on society’.1 As visual representations, images form part of the cultural codes that structure the ‘web of human social relations and interactions’ (Chartier, 1994, 326). Images can be explored as part of the cultural practices that structure human every day life and inuence social communication and interaction. The Berlin exhibition shows how images were used as arguments in a religious-ideological discourse. ‘Sermons in Colour’. Protestant Religious Images In spite of the rationalist, word-centred claims of academic theology, visualisations were important to material religious practise through all social classes of nineteenth-century German Protestantism. Tensions with reformation theology could be eased by underlining the antiiconoclast restraint and poetic, musical urge of Luther (Nithack-Stahn, 1908a; 1908b, 463). Academic art theories resumed the idealist philosophy of the post-Enlightenment period and emphasized the particular intellectual value of artistic perception. Enjoying works of art was not 1 Burke, 2001, 179. Cf. the discussion in: Roeck, 2003; Kittsteiner, 2004; Bruhn/ Borgmann, 2005.

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merely a secularised religious surrogate for middle class religiosity.2 In various nuances the Kunstfrömmigkeit was related to Christian world views and correlated with Protestant devotional practise. In anthropological perspective, art was associated with the birth of human self-reection that led up to transforming the natural state of mankind by religion and culture (Krech, 1999). Art seemed to give meaning and to harmonise world contingencies. For the Bildungsbürger, it belonged to the distinguishing decorum of being educated; it imagined historical continuity and contributed to a more sophisticated, aesthetic world interpretation. Late nineteenth-century German Protestantism innovatively explored the potential of images for liturgical, didactical and devotional purposes. Professional theological journals contributed to contemporary art critique, published in 1896 images and discussed their application in religious Protestant context. Friedrich Spitta and Julius Smend, both academic theologians, founded the Monatsschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst as a periodical that reected upon a new artistic mission in church services and architecture. Since 1904 and under the auspices of pastor David Koch, the cautiously conservative Christliche Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule und Haus (founded in 1866) changed from a rather conventionalist organ into a dynamic magazine that energetically promoted art among Protestant clergy. Systematically, these journals reected on common religious practise and folklore. They brought regional peculiarities to notice, balanced the differences between urban and rural communities and consequently contributed to standardising a national style. Church ministers recommended and employed art as transporting dogmatic content, upgrading personal devotion and commemorating religious rites de passages.3 As ‘curates in colour’, images were appreciated as complementing the purely verbal act of preaching.4 Communicating belief, they formed knowledge and interconnected the generations—between cleric and community, teacher and pupils, parents and children. Most religious images were circulated in print media. As mirrored by the abundance of small-format votive images that were distributed at baptisms, weddings and funerals (and also as disciplining rewards in

2 In this manner, David Friedrich Strauss had proclaimed the end of established religion by the achievements of science and the cultural state; he was mocked by Nietzsche as ‘Bildungsphilister’. Cf. Nipperdey, 1998, 519f.; Hölscher, 2005, 377ff.; on the political implications cf. Hardtwig, 1990; Mommsen, 1990. 3 On devotional images cf. Scharfe, 1968; Jonsson, 1984. 4 Hoffmann, 1897, 93; similarly Christliches Kunstblatt, 1891.

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elementary school religious education), the printed image was intended to prolong the church preaching into the private sphere. The images stimulated individual memories, religious edication and expressed a notion of social belonging. Among Protestant periodicals, frequently the use and choice of conrmation certicates (Konrmationsscheine) was discussed. Initially rather a legal document, late nineteenth-century certicates put reproductions of well-known religious images into their centre: a personalised bible quote and an art print were supposed to reect an individual act of faith. Many of these pictured sheets found their way into bibles or prayer books. Predominantly in country households, these images successively became an integral part of private furnishing.5 Yet the preachers did not close their minds to experiments and technological innovation. In the journal Die Christliche Welt, the young Stuttgart reverends Theodor Traub and Albert Leube enthusiastically reported on their tremendous success with the organisation of a Christmas service, in which they displayed several images via the Sciopticon, an early slide projector. As they candidly recounted, they copied the use of this ‘enviable instrument’ by fairground showmen and urban public lectures. The community’s excited reaction proved them to be right: they noticed the alteration of the original images by the considerable size of the projections, were amazed by the light effects, but acknowledged that the images left a deep impression (Leube, 1907, 1074; Traub, 1908; cf. Weichelt, 1908). Rather than having immediate access to the artistic production, educated art appraisal consumed preselected, reproduced, popularized, illustrative images in prints, journals and on exhibitions. Religious art became a market, by which the variety of providers mirrored the individual religious choice and group awareness.6 Most religious prints preferred a simple, unambiguous message. The art of the Nazarenes, a group of programmatically religious artists active at the beginning of the 19th century, lent itself naturally for Christian application.7 A homogenous artistic taste yet could not be promoted. 5 Cf. for instructive examples of early 20th century interiors in rural Franconia, see the photographs in Langner, 1992. 6 An article by pastor Klotz reveals how modern and protable this market worked. Publishing agencies aggressively tried to increase their sales and to win over sextons and teachers as sales agents. A Stuttgart rm promised a washing machine per every 80 sold art prints to its salesmen: Klotz, 1911. Cf. also Brückner, 2000. 7 Jonsson, 1984, 106f.; cf. Metken, 1977. Due to their sharp contours and clear colours, these paintings could inexpensively be reproduced without overly reducing visual quality.

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The range covered devotional images with a distinct dogmatic message that were distributed by orthodox magazine publishing companies such as the Constance Sonntagsgruß Himmelan as well as prints of contemporary art from leading houses such as high-minded Munich Callwey Verlag. Protestant imagery reected the confessional and social diversication and had to respond to diverging aesthetic demands. For example, the liberal minister and religious author Arthur Bonus enthusiastically wrote to the publisher Ferdinand Avenarius how much he appreciated his Dürer prints for usage as Konrmationsscheine.8 As initiator of the culture-nationalist periodical Der Kunstwart, Avenarius strived for a renewal of art in line with modern style and German art tradition. His publishing amalgamated masterworks of the early modern period with a selection of recent successful painters; in addition, his reproductions were of reasonable quality compared to contemporary mass copies. Bonus praised these prints, because they avoided sentimentality, mawkish ‘Kunstseligkeit’ and a false folksiness; in contrast, he demanded undisguised expressiveness. Also David Koch in his Kunstblatt set out for a ght against the ‘cloud of unhealthy sentimentality and effeminate feelings’, which in his eyes characterised prevailing devotional art. ‘How deep have the Protestant people sunk!’—the religious art print was perceived as indicating the cultural identity of its users. Yet what was more, a regeneration of aesthetic awareness was aspired bringing about a remedy against backwardness and social segregation (Koch, 1909, 1). Referring to the confessional divide in late nineteenth-century Germany, many reviewers nevertheless appreciated that ‘a specically “Protestant” style does not exist’. It would suit Protestantism as a cultural factor not to withdraw into a separate, ecclesiastical art language but to permeate the worldly society. It was particularly the modern ‘new style’ of a moderate, idealising realism that was reclaimed for a Christian-religious art that supported the search for a renewal of German church and society (Koch, 1900, 4f.; Sell, 1898, 374; Schubring, 1901, 809). After the turn of the century, also symbolist painters such as Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger, who dealt with psychological topics such as yearning, love, Eros and death, successively gained ground.9

8

Concept Letter Arthur Bonus to Ferdinand Avenarius, Großmuckrow, 23. January 1902 [Archive of the Lutheran Church in Thuringia, Nachlaß Arthur Bonus, Eisenach]; Bonus referred to the pieces 25/26 of Meisterbilder für das deutsche Haus, Munich 1901. 9 Cf. for example Weizsäcker, 1902 (a review); Bonus, 1902.

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These artists were appreciated because they would give expression to German culture in contrast to foreign art styles (Mai, 1983, 444–448; Gross, 1989, 196–253). Furthermore, in confessionalist perspective they were praised as the embodiment of ‘German-Protestant’ painting. The works of Fritz von Uhde, Wilhelm Steinhausen and Eduard von Gebhardt, who all repeatedly dealt with Biblical topics, seemed to document the cultural and ethical progressiveness of Protestantism against the clericalism of the Catholic Church. In contrast to a symbolic representation of religious ideas, it was perceived as ‘Protestant’ to connect the Biblical stories to human worldliness. Protestant reviewers generally mentioned the naturalist accommodation of the depicted biblical subjects into rural landscapes scenes. The religious message of the images was found in the ‘devotion’ of the painted disciples ‘listening to the preacher’ that united a society transgressing class orders in the encounter with Christ. Peasants, craftsmen and burghers alike formed the depicted religious community. Particularly Gebhardt’s pictures that transferred the gospel from ancient Palestine to reformation period home ground were experienced as ‘copied from everyday life’ (Rosenberg, 1899, 76; Koch, 1910, 4; cf. Kühner, 1908). Uhde depicted Jesus among the unprivileged poor, even though his paintings avoided the offensiveness of social protest. Uhde, who became a prominent member of the Munich ‘Secession’, was appreciated for his cautious employment of French expressionist plein air style. His painting ‘The Lord’s Supper’, presented at the Berlin art show of 1886, at rst was rigorously rejected by Protestant critics. Jesus, in the painting appearing among a contemporary crowd—a ‘mob of criminals’, as a review read—seemed to offend religious sentiments. In traditional opinion, religious art had to use the idealist, spiritualizing forms that were represented by the Nazarenes. ‘We are looking for the divine and are not able to nd it’, as reactions described the realist approach of Uhde: the ‘ideal and poetic’ was missed (Weizsäcker, 1894, 787; Merz, 1897, 44). Bourgeois observers on the other hand soon found these images as mirroring their concern at the social question. The worldliness in this approach of painting Christ was welcomed. It seemed to call for Christian practise, but kept away from ‘dogmatic materialism’ and demonstrated ‘the marks of God everywhere in the world’ ( Jatho, 1911, 790. Cf. Brand, 1983, 71–74). This Jesus-gure, who took all efforts to ennoble his Proletarian fellows, could be interpreted as exemplifying the Protestant attempts at reintegrating the lower classes by an educative meliorism.

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‘Modern Art—Our Ally’.10 Art, Reform and National Culture In spring 1906, the Baden preachers’ association listened to a lecture by pastor Karl Kühner discussing the search for a renewal of cultural ideals by arts. The contemporary enthusiasm for arts was more than a coincidence, as Kühner claimed: It means a reaction against the mammonist and materialist bustle of the last 35 years after the national unication of our German people. After a wave of extensive, but merely practical political expansion and idolization of power (Machtvergötterung) in our national and economical life, now comes a new wave of longing for spiritual values, deepening our education, cultivation of personal life.11

Modern, non-ecclesiastical painting with its emotional expressivity was regarded as preparing the renaissance of Christian idealism, as the liberal church historian Karl Sell argued. He reected the search among the Wilhelminian middle class educated for a progressive artistic ideal, an artistic culture that would comply with modernity. It however remained indistinct and controversial, which conception of art precisely could full these demands. On the one hand, they repudiated the monumental Historicist art style that was preferred and promoted by the Kaiser and the political elites. On the other hand, they were alarmed by the cultural acceleration and diversication, which found its expression in constantly fresh avant-gardes (Cf. Paret, 1981). Church ofcials complained about the loss of connection with modern art. The church walls should be open to contemporary culture, as they claimed. In 1910, the Berlin branch of the Verein für Innere Mission—not only a missionary pressure group, but also a forum for Protestant selfreection—invited the Jena art historian Paul Weber to lecture on new currents in art. A renewed alliance of religion and art would help to cure the social fragmentations of modern society, as Weber argued. He pointed to Langbehn’s book Rembrandt als Erzieher, which according to Weber unfortunately did not play a role in discourse on art any more. In Langbehn’s Rembrandt-book—a highly inuential publication among the right-wing middle classes—he found the unity of art, religion and nation ideally heralded (Weber, 1911, 88f.). To the educated middle classes, the debates on contemporary art and the struggle for national

10 11

Quote from Bittlinger, 1905. Kühner, 1906, 1157; cf. the notication in Protestantenblatt 39 (1906) 695–696.

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culture were essentially tied together. In his inuential description of the outset of German nationalist ideology, Fritz Stern described the bildungsbürgerliche cultural debates as pessimistic, defensive conservatism (Stern, 1961). Even though this characterised the nervous angst of cultural deprivation, he marginalised the specic urge for modernisation among the Wilhelminian bourgeois reform movements, which culminated in an investment of the term nationalism with a new meaning. National culture was not taken for granted but perceived as a mission, not as existing, but as yet to be attained; it was sent into the fray as remedy for being ‘deadlocked’ as a ‘frozen people’ (Katz, 1907, 18f.; Avenarius, 1912, 1). As future objective, the nation yet was to be re-invented and formed by the example of a cultural elite. ‘This is not chauvinism’, as the author Max Osborn assured his readers when he called for the evolution of an authentically German style: Cultural regeneration was to bring ‘new motion into the intellectual life of a new world’ (Osborn, 1897, 861; cf. Avenarius, 1900, 1; vom Bruch, 2003, 354). These artistic ideals resonated through liberal Protestant reections on art. In an article on Kunst und Religion, the pastor Gustav Lasch disclosed his aesthetic sources: Kunstwart, Dürerbund and the culture-nationalist journal Der Türmer (Lasch, 1906, 246; König, 1910, 155.160; Kühner, 1908, 470). The Kunstwart hoped to complete what had begun in the unication of the German states in 1870/71. The journal sought for an inner, moral renewal of the people as precondition for the national future. The representative aesthetic values and authoritarian rituals of the Wilhelminian state, symbolised by the Kaiser’s artistic paladin Anton von Werner, were violently repudiated.12 Materialism and intellectualism were contrasted to an emotionalised ‘Innerlichkeit’ as the essence of German culture. Even though an assimilation of art and religion was rejected, an idealistic ‘Glaubenskultur’ was expected to sharpen cultural self-awareness of Protestantism (Cf. Steinhausen, 1906; Kratzsch, 1969, 190–195; vom Bruch, 2003, 344–346). According to the religious author Karl König, the recent enthusiasm for modern art bore the signs of

12 This becomes palpable at the reactions to the architecture and furnishing of the Berlin cathedral. Built between 1894 and 1905, it met with blunt disapproval in several cultural journals. As a pioneering and state-sponsored project, the building would offer an ‘unpleasant perspective’, cf. Weizsäcker, 1894, 22; it resembled the ‘monstrous deformities’ of ‘Popish temples’, cf. Jatho, 1910, 229. The architecture was mocked as inspired by the Counter Reformation and—more seriously—by a mind ‘to whom courtly etiquette means the highest grandeur’: cf. Avenarius, 1904/05; Schwaner, 1905.

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a ‘religious-moral renewal’. By the disapproval of the traditional art and ornate crafts, the longing for a natural culture made itself manifest. König plied for ‘Ausdruckskultur’ and an aesthetic harmony with natural simplicity that rested on the ‘totality of the soul’. Karl Kühner appreciated the contemporary enthusiasm for art as ‘symptomatic for the revived aspiration to transcend materialistic attitudes’ and to come back to idealistic ‘spiritual values’. Art would therefore be important for Protestant religious practise. The aesthetic style that was propagated by the Kunstwart had an enormous resonance among the Bildungsbürger. ‘One could see in the houses of pastors and teachers, in the furnishings of post secretaries and district judges, if they were readers of the Kunstwart’, as Theodor Heuss remembered. Since 1902, the journal was anked by the Dürerbund, which Avenarius initiated to stabilize a wider movement for cultural renewal. In the Christliche Welt, Friedrich Michael Schiele advertised for the Dürerbund and urged his fellow readers to join this association. The league would support ‘social pedagogical work in the broadest sense’, as he claimed (Heuss, 1963, 22; Schiele, 1903, 1051; cf. vom Bruch, 2003). The Berlin exhibition ‘Das Christusideal in der deutschen Kunst’ referred to these endeavours. ‘. . . The Mere Appearance of a Religious Feeling . . .’: The Design of the Christ Exhibition The novelist and poet Wilhelm Lentrodt remembered the Berlin exhibition ‘Das Christusideal in der deutschen Kunst’ in a brochure on the cultural history of images of Jesus. Continuously searching for religious experience, Lentrodt belonged to Berlin’s Bohemian world and was in touch with the numerous urban avant-gardes and cultural experiments.13 According to Lentrodt, the exhibition exemplarily documented an artistic search for a renewed religious identity. He rhapsodised on the atmosphere of cultural change and the search for new horizons in the 1890s: What a turmoil we experienced ten [. . .] years ago! We had the feeling something was about to happen, something great was about to be born, a new world was rising from chaos. We believed to be part of a period

13 He initially joined the artistic-mystical ‘Neue Gemeinschaft’ of the brothers Julius and Heinrich Hart, cf. Bruns, 1998, 366. Simultaneously, he was in close contact with Wilhelm Schwaner’s culture-nationalist Volkserzieher-movement.

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christopher könig of progress in arts [. . .]! Every day, we were waiting for the breakthrough. A ood of ink poured out of our hands. What a waste of words, of theories! Everyone knew what the great piece of art had to look like. But everybody had his own formula. And thus—an untamed war was waged in the newspapers that suddenly sprang up like mushrooms, only to disappear as quickly again!14

The Berlin ‘Christ exhibition’ opened in the reputable facilities of Berlin’s former Herrenhaus-building on 12 May 1896. The show was organised by a private collector, the consul and art dealer to the Swedish-Norwegian court, Theodor Bierck. Even though the exhibition reached only a moderate standard, it had a visionary programme and received wide public attendance. Bierck assembled nine paintings of Christ created by painters well-known and successful in the contemporary German art scene, among them the celebrated artists Franz Stuck, Fritz von Uhde and Hans Thoma. All paintings had the same goal to depict Christ as entirely human. One of the rst press reviews, an article published in the liberal daily Berliner Fremdenblatt, proclaimed that Bierck meant to obtain ‘an image of the Lord by recognised artists, and this not as a suffering, emaciated appearance, but as the vigorous and forceful gure of a victorious warrior’. This was part of his intention to achieve an image of Christ that was ‘contemporary (zeitgemäß )’. In Bierck’s account—reected by the public discussion—this term became synonymous with Protestant and German. As he claimed, he wanted ‘German sensibility at its best (deutsche Empndungsart im höchsten Licht)’ to appear in the pictures. This implied a rather vague but obvious awareness of confessional and national identity: ‘In our [. . .] time, the Italian perception, which predominantly depicted the saviour as a weak and feeble man, is refused’. By rejecting an ‘Italian perception’, Bierck turned himself against the religious art of the Nazarene school which he saw as portraying a Catholic ideal. His selection of paintings was to prove that, as Michelangelo was able to unify religion and artistic expression in his painted visions of God, modern German art could do the same to his Protestant contemporaries (Fremdenblatt; Bierck, 1896, 5.3; R.S, 1896). The design of the exhibition mirrored an exodus of religious production from the established churches. It was not unusual to organize expositions of religious art in churches or to display religious works in

14

Quote from Lentrodt, 1908, 28f.

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art shows: Simultaneously with the discussion of the Berlin exposition a successful collection of glass prints with scenes of the life of Jesus assembled by the board of the Leipzig ‘Innere Mission’ circulated through several German cities (Rade, 1896). But Bierck deliberately had excluded any ofcial church participation and transferred the religious discussion into a non-religious environment. By organizing an art exposition, he used a worldly medium of reection that belonged to bourgeois representation and educated culture (Mai, 1986). Yet, Bierck nonetheless aimed for the religious feelings of his audience; he apparently tried everything to create a solemn and sacral atmosphere. As a visitor remarked, the exhibition design proved an exquisite ‘condence in style’. The exhibition rooms, including the entrance hall, were covered with Persian rugs to mufe any sound to a ‘gentle silence’. Cypress foliage was used for decoration, but also had the purpose to separate the paintings and to confront the viewers with each picture individually (Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 610). An aesthetic experience was meant to merge with a religious impression. Bierck documented his aims in a catalogue, which could be obtained as an introductory booklet at the entrance of the exposition. For each picture, he had chosen a commentary passage by the artist and published them in the brochure to guide the visitors’ interpretation. In addition to the press reviews, this booklet gives access to the far-reaching religious and cultural considerations behind the project. Bierck emphasized in the brochure that he had specically asked the painters for a religious piece of art: ‘an image of Christ, arisen from the profundity of their individual religious views, yet complying with the beliefs of every Christian’. He considered an unbiased artistic approach of the individual painter to be representative of the religious feelings of his contemporaries. Bierck asked the artists to depict ‘the mere appearance of a religious perception (als blosse Erscheinung einer religiösen Empndung)’. They were supposed to offer their subjective feelings, but what is more, these individual sentiments were regarded as conveying signicance and meaning for any Christian. Bierck rejected the historicist Bible art style, which had become popular among Protestants during the end of the nineteenth-century. He aimed to setting off the image of Jesus from the conventions of tradition and devotional imagery. To meet these demands, both iconographic symbols and specic biblical scenery were to be abandoned. Bierck wanted an ‘image of the Lord, detached from a constructed stage setting with walk-on parts and liberated from a more or less reasonable plot’ (Bierck, 1896, 3–5).

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These demands concurred with the self-perception of the artists: Hans Thoma explained in the reections on his canvas that he had not produced a mere objet d’art, but rather, his painting was to be understood as commencing a process of religious communication. Art ‘powerfully affects the human heart’ and thus can express ‘a shared inner religious feeling’. He was also taken aback at the publicity around the exhibition. Thoma complained in letters to his friend, the art historian Henry Thode, that he had not known his picture would be shown in a travelling show besides others. After having visited the exposition, he grumbled that he felt embarrassed. Thoma expected the painting to be presented ‘at a peaceful site’. Several press reviews had the same impression, judging that the seriousness and wholeheartedness of the project would be spoiled by too much public attention. This was not due to objections concerning a non-ecclesiastical depiction of Christ. Rather, they feared that the depth of an individual, contemplative appreciation of the canvasses was interfered by too much public activity. ‘The comparative to exhibition is sensation’, as a review remarked. Thoma was also afraid that his profoundly religious work of art would be begrimed by urban art critics: ‘How could Christ be painted for the Berlin press?’ (Bierck, 1896, 19; Thoma, 1928, 144; Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 610). Images and identity: Debating the Christ paintings At rst, the Berlin exhibition did not receive extensive coverage in the daily press, of which the industrial exposition, taking place simultaneously on Berlin’s fairgrounds, could well be the reason. The Christliche Kunstblatt announced the opening of the exhibition with a synopsis of Bierck’s reections. Another prompt reaction from Protestant church circles occurred in the journal Die Christliche Welt, a publicist platform of liberal Protestantism. Backed by the editor Martin Rade, the pastor Johannes Werner summarized his impression immediately after a short visit to the exposition. He took the opportunity and urged his fellow readers to take notice of what he thought to be a ‘highly important project’ (R.S., 1896; Werner, 1896; Rade, 1896a). In the end the exhibition had to be prolonged for further three months and consequently moved through all of Germany as a travelling exhibition. In the course of the following years, the show time and again was acclaimed in several reports in Protestant journals and cultural magazines. Particularly, a lengthy article in the art journal Die Kunst für Alle contributed to the

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circulation of the images. Aiming at a popularisation of common art taste, the widely-read magazine published the images anked by detailed quotes from Bierck’s catalogue and thereby laid down the guidelines of further discussion (Kunst für Alle, 1897, cf. Hübner, 1954). A second publication in the lavishly illustrated tome on ‘Protestantism at the end of XIX century’ transferred the exhibited images into national Protestant reection (Schubring, 1901). The paintings of the Berlin ‘Christusausstellung’ can be viewed as giving visual evidence to a religious endeavour. The images fostered the ‘imagination’ of a cultural and historical identity (Cf. Anderson, 1991). They became instruments that substantiated inner, mental images. In the same measure, as the obviousness of Protestant culture and religiosity eroded, the portrayal re-assured the supporters of a modern ‘Christ’. The images materialised a complex religious argumentation: Disconnected from their sources by the press debate, they were placed in a communicative context and contributed to reecting about a set of contested religious ideals. In addition to verbal communication, they began to mould the religious emotions of their viewers in their own right. The invisibility of historical process—belief in progress, religious need and social conict—became palpable by being portrayed. The reviews devotedly disputed the message of the images, predominantly asking if the pictures were able to correspond with a contemporary Protestant ideal. They were very aware that Bierck aimed at a polarizing effect. The paintings irritated, provoked, but also met with enthusiastic approval. This was already guaranteed by the group of artists Bierck had selected for contribution. All of them represented modern artistic currents: Besides e.g. the historical painter Arthur Kampf, Franz Stuck or Gabriel Max were exponents of symbolism with an inclination to spiritist topics. All of the presented images resembled traditional pictorial concepts of a longhaired and bearded Christ in owing robes. Even the paintings that avoided explicit Christian symbols immediately could be identied as portrayals of Jesus. Nevertheless, the reactions diverged: Several images were found to be foreign and difcult. The painting by Arthur Kampf had an obvious agenda, which was recognised by all commentators (Fig. 1). Kampf ‘renounced everything traditional’ and, as he claimed himself, purely wanted to show a man striving for the redemption of humanity. This redemption articulated itself in a social connotation: Kampf ’s ‘Christ’ was perceived as a labouring man ‘who carries the burden of all humankind’ with a

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‘crooked posture’ and ‘marked by the struggle for survival’. Kampf ’s ‘Christ’ was not rejected straight away by the critics, but left an impression of discomfort. The reviews claimed that Kampf exaggerated only one side of Christ’s character: this ‘Christ is a proletarian fanatic’. Even though in mainstream Protestantism the ‘social question’ had developed into an important issue, this image of Christ remained rather offensive. One account identied it as Jewish. Despite not being explicitly antiSemitic, it denoted an impression of otherness: a ‘man of Jewish origin’. It was apparently the combination of social message and ‘Jewishness’ that hindered an unbiased approach to Kampf ’s painting, and caused the picture to be objectionable (Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 611.613; Bierck, 1896, 9; Kunst für Alle, 1897, 306f.; Wächtler, 1902, 609). ‘A Jewish prole’ was also alleged of the painting of the Munich portrait painter and art teacher, Karl Marr. Again, the supposed Jewishness was established by a subliminal combination of clichés as opposed to an explicitly racist agenda. In this case, the seated gure was named a ‘superior ne thinker’, a ‘philosophically controlled mind’ and ‘a Spinoza [. . .], who owns a subtle rather than a keen intellect’. However, Marr’s ‘Christ’ did not cause the same offence as Kampf ’s painting. Marr’s dramatic scenery seemed to appeal to the critics, who acknowledged the dynamic of the ‘sanguineous re ares’ contrasting with the ‘dignity’ of the gure in the foreground. ‘We see the tragic fate of the master who came to redeem this world with his blood’, as Marr’s symbolism was interpreted (Nicolai, 1897, 180; Matthes, 1898, 103; Kunst für Alle, 1897, 307; Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 614). In contrast to these paintings, the pictures which were perceived as explicitly ‘German’ expressed a certain sense of belonging. Karl Kühner, a regular contributor to art questions in liberal church journals, praised some of the paintings, because the artists, ‘by reviving a long lost tradition of German art, consciously Germanised Christ, transferred him to a home soil and to German Wesen.’ (Kühner, 1909, 169; cf. Burggraf, 1907/08, 83) ‘[. . .] this painting we understand at once’, a review celebrated Ferdinand Brütt’s version of ‘Christ’. In fact, this painting was highly conventional. ‘He is the blonde type with a mild and earnest face’, as the ‘Fremdenblatt’ reported. Similarly, it could be alleged of Ernst Zimmermann’s painting that it showed ‘a Germanic type’. The Munich art professor, using his skilfulness in landscape painting, situated his Jesus in ‘shadowy woodlands’ and ‘pacing through the meadows reecting upon his lore and fate’, as Zimmermann claried. Although Zimmermann’s painting could be acknowledged as beautiful, it was not

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accepted as an adequate approach to his sujet. ‘[. . .] the impression is nice, but not overwhelming’, as one commentator summarized (Kunst für Alle, 1898, 306f.; Bierck, 1896, 23; Nicolai, 1897, 180). Ironically, alluding to the Wagnerian romantic opera, a third picture created by Gabriel Max was found to show a ‘Lohengrin’. According to the critic, Max’s painting bore resemblance to the mediaevalist imagery depicting the noble opera hero on his knightly quest for the Holy Grail.15 Max painted Jesus vested in long, owing robes and stepping out of a dark room, followed by a dimly drawn disciple. The ‘Kunst für Alle’ consequently stressed the ‘immeasurable tenderness of his soul’ and ‘inapproachable purity’ of this ‘Christ’, who looked ‘like a Florentine Gentleman’. Yet the critics were upset about the reserved and contemplative inactivity of this representation: Max ‘increased the sensitivity into somnambulism’.16 Even though Arthur Kampf ’s proletarian ‘Christ’ was too offensive in its social meaning, Max’s complete detachment of Jesus from the Gospel tradition was a step too far as well: With his stylish beard, his soft and temperate nature, this is a completely modern man, who keeps anything unlikeable away. What has he to do with the Christ who descended to the sinners [. . .]? Can this squeamish person characterise Christ, a prophet great in word and deed?17

As a contrast, Ferdinand Brütt’s pastoral version of ‘Christ’ could be highlighted as a ‘truly Protestant concept’. It showed ‘the seless redeemer who is willing to be sacriced and who was sent to heal us and take away our sorrows’.18 The expectations of the painting of Fritz von Uhde were very high. In the ‘Christliche Welt’, Uhde had been acclaimed as ‘our painter’ (Gerok, 1894). Raising his hands in declamatory gesticulation, his ‘Christ’ was obviously pictured as preaching. Again, the critics highlighted that the depicted gure seemed to be ‘rmly rooted in his native soil (aus dem Volke)’ (Kunst für Alle, 1897, 306). Yet an on-rst-glance ‘German’ appearance by no means ensured a unanimous assent on the picture. Uhde’s contribution to the Berlin exhibition was found to be a disappointment and a weak artistic achievement. The commentators

15

Werner, 1896, 574; cf. Hartwich, 2000, 103–106; for examples Veltzke, 2002. Kunst für Alle, 1897, 306; Kühner, 1909, 170; Franz Skarbina’s contribution received similar comments. 17 Quote from Nicolai, 1897, 180. 18 Quote from Kunst für Alle, 1897, 306. 16

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criticized that it seemed to be ‘a ow of words’, which ‘escaped from the misshapen mouth’ of this ‘feeble man’. Uhde’s ‘Christ’ resembled not so much an inspiring preacher as a ‘demagogue’: ‘Can this please, this garrulous Christ?’ (Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 612; cf. Nicolai, 1897, 180; Wächtler, 1902, 608). Two further artists, however, were consistently singled out by the reviewers for their efforts to compete with a genuinely religious expression. The ‘Kunst für Alle’ intoned a hymn of praise about the painting by Hans Thoma (Fig. 2). It is the ‘main work of this collection regarding spiritual as well as artistic aspects’, as the journalist claimed. Thoma had chosen to include the frame into his composition; in doing so, he had made evident use of Christian symbols. Contrasting with the deep blue painting, the glowing red frame carried on its corners the symbols of the four evangelists. Alluding to the Eucharistic elements, Thoma decorated the sides of the frame with wheat ears and grapevines. The bottom was ornamented with a crown of thorns. The upside was capped by an aureate cross anked by two Baroquesque putti. As a consequence of this rather familiar symbolic concept, the art critics were jubilant that ‘Thoma gave us [. . .] the most Christian Christ that has ever been painted’. In the reviewer’s eyes, Thoma’s whole approach was praiseworthy: We see a simple burgher’s character, his soulful gaze upon us, blonde hair bedecks chin and parting, a blossom held in his right hand. A saviour in utmost corporeal vigour and beauty. We do not face a Semitic type, which might be astonishing. We see an ideal character [. . .]. We see the religious mind of the master embodied in his art.

The commentator’s enthusiasm seemed to stem from Thoma’s subtle play with common, easily recognizable features. Since his ‘Christ’ bore items of traditional iconography, the depiction could be viewed as a positive renewal on religious grounds. The ‘Kunst für Alle’-reviewer appreciated Thoma’s attempt to replace the crucixus with a vitalised and heroic concept: We feel with Thoma: Christ, who overcame death, must not be shown to us believers as grieving for death. [. . .] Aficted features show the weakness of his body and soul. But we do not want to see weakness in Christ who was strong in faith and suffering.19

19

Kunst für Alle, 1897, 308f., emphasis in the original.

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Reviews in Protestant church journals, however, were not impressed by this image. Thoma’s painting resembled ancient iconography too closely: Beate Bonus-Jeep thought it to look like a ‘shrine’ or like a ‘vignette in a brand new prayer book’. ‘A boring picture’ was her general impression (Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 612; cf. Lasch, 1904, 379; Werner, 1896, 574). Similarly, a critic had to admit: Mayby I am a Barbarian, but Thoma’s colour harmonies did not impress me at all, because the gure of Christ [. . .] seems stiff and without an inner intellectual life. Who would expect earth-shaking thoughts in this featureless head or eternal love in this frozen smile?20

These reviews favoured the ‘Christ’ by the Munich art professor Franz Stuck (Fig. 3): it ‘perhaps might be the most signicant one; at least it is the most interesting one’.21 In Schubring’s eyes, Stuck’s piece also was ‘the most “modern” painting’. Again, most accentuated were the personality and heroic vitalization of the ‘Christ’: ‘[. . .] Stuck abandons the mild traits that have been emphasized by tradition for the vigour of a keen and impassionate character’, in Schubring’s opinion. In the same way, Bonus-Jeep found that the painting expressed ‘a fervent passion’ and ‘breathed re’: this ‘Christ’ came to ‘send off words like a two-edged sword’. The ‘Kunst für Alle’ summarized: ‘He is indeed not the Biblical Christ: This is the Christ in the world view of the autonomous but not less pious Christian’ (Schubring, 1901, 826; Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 614; Kunst für Alle, 1907, 307). ‘Simultaneousness with Christ’: The debate on a Modern Jesus The exhibition faced ‘the most urgent problem of our times, the Jesus-problem’, as a review highlighted (Kühner, 1909, 172). Cultural debate at the turn of the century seemed to prove that the dream of a harmonization of religion with culture was unattainable. The enthusiastic hopes for a progressive, liberal culture impregnated by Christian values, which was nurtured by the foundation of a Protestant Reich in 1871, were shattered by the social and political realities. The new formula—born from the abyss between Christian ethical endeavours and

20

Quote from Nicolai, 1897, 180. Ibid.; cf. Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 614; Kühner, 1909, 170; Lasch, 1904, 382; R.S., 1896, 123. 21

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social constraints—seemed to be ‘Christian or modern’: fundamentally the ‘possibility of being Christian in the modern world’ forced itself into dispute (Stephan, 1898; Bonus/Perino/Schian, 1898; Foerster, 1898). Liberal Protestants voiced their demand at simultaneousness of religion with cultural development: ‘Our religious language is almost completely platitude (Phrase)’, as the liberal pastor Arthur Bonus described a common feeling that liberal theology lost its former attraction (Bonus, 1911, 70). Bonus, as many of his younger colleagues, urged for a renewal of theology. An active and individual shaping of life (‘Lebensgestaltung’) was required, ‘not supercial culture, but rousing up a strong creative inner life’ (Pauli, 1908, 16f.). The art historian Paul Schubring referred to the Berlin ‘Christ exhibition’ as an exemplary endeavour that heralded the aspired shift in contemporary religious art: The German wants a German faith. [ . . .] All over the German lands, there is a deep yearning for a Christianity that overcomes the escapist and fatigued, exhausted mood and that conveys the manly, strong, life-loving, sunny temper of the Germans (Germanenart). Art impatiently waits for an opportunity to represent this ideal.22

According to Walter Nithack-Stahn, pastor at the Berlin Kaiser-WilhelmGedächtnis-Kirche, a modern Protestant religiosity would consist in ‘subjective Christianity’. Drawing upon concepts of liberal theology, he highlighted the necessity of an immediate, individualized and undogmatic world-relation. Protestantism was ‘namely not merely religion, simplied Christianity: it is a way of thinking (Gesinnung)’. By its expressive means he found art to be a way of capturing a religious motion. Yet a subjective, religious appropriation could not be achieved without a transformation according to the national character: ‘Doesn’t that mean to adapt Christianity from Greek to German spirit? And doesn’t that also comply with the historical truth?’23 Predominantly among intellectuals at the margin of the evangelical churches, a merging of religious and nationalist sentiments can be observed. In the same measure, as popular diagnoses described the political and social ideals as endangered, a variety of periodicals and educated cultural magazines set out to seek a thorough cultural renewal.24 Many intellectuals claimed 22

Schubring, 1901, 842. Nithack-Stahn, 1905/06, 435f. Nithack-Stahn consequently propagated this personalised connection via art in a novel: Der Mittler, 1907. 24 For important approaches at a methodological reappraisal of Protestant nationalisms, see Kuhlemann, 2001; Hübinger, 2000; Graf, 2000. 23

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a Protestant cultural principle that increasingly was manifested outside the churches.25 ‘Protestant culture’ became a political catchphrase that expressed a future vision. Protestantism was perceived not only as a dogmatic formal principle but rather as an attitude, a ‘Gesinnung’, which strived for realisation. According to a lecture by pastor Paul Kirmß on the Protestantentag 1911, the moral and liberal ideal of Protestantism could be attained only in harmony with ‘real culture’ (Kirmß, 1911, 10). Kirmß did not simply propagate to merge the given national and religious world views. His lecture reected the restless search for cultural synthesis among the Wilheminian Bildungsbürger that would lead to a progressive, national renewal with a religious fundament. Religious discourse turned out to be the venue for testing the normative foundation of modern culture and society. The novelty of the exhibition was the idea to make a contemporary ‘religious impression’ a subject of art. The journal Die Christliche Freiheit mocked the importance of art in middle class religious self-reection: ‘every winter, there is a lecture on Nietzsche in our cities by a local or an itinerant intellectual, who preaches: art redeems’ (Wehnert, 1910, 728). This reacted to the various versions of a self-cultivating Bildungsreligion, which propagated art itself as a religious surrogate following Nietzsche or Goethe.26 Fostered by Nietzschean philosophy and the cultural critique of the reform movement, a rened and progressive form of Christian religiosity was longed for. Christianity, then, could be dened as the religion of the strong individual, of the search for nature, nobility and true aesthetic.27 This reected the religious criticism of the philosophy of life and contrasted the church with a Zukunftsreligion, a future religion in antirational terms. Intellectuals as different as Paul de Lagarde or Albert Kalthoff envisioned a practical religiosity that gave up the institution of a church: new religion had to renounce the dogmatic relics of the past and to be ‘created from the sources of life and the depth of the mind’ (Kalthoff, 1905, 7; Lagarde, 1892, 217ff.). In this context, a nationalization of religion was frequently debated in Protestant periodicals at the turn of the century. Even if Christianity were acknowledged as a universal religion, some theologians urged their colleagues to include contemporary popular Völkerpsychologie in

25 26 27

Cf. for example Borkenhagen, 1905/06; from monist perspective Veeh, 1913. Ernst, 1914, 24; cf. e.g. Nithack-Stahn, 1908. For example Gallwitz, 1896; cf. Aschheim, 2000, 222f.

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theology. Protestantism was not an ‘abstract-Christian religion of ideas’, but was realized by the believers in their individual cultural context and traditions, and should therefore attain the local ‘colours’.28 Furthermore, the nationalization was hoped to bring about a missionary effect. Professor Julius Smend, for example, argued on the basis of a pessimistic diagnosis of the religious future that ‘the majority of Protestant compatriots [. . .] have turned away from active Christianity’. Smend hoped to reappraise Christianity under the preconditions of modernity by going back to a transformation of Christianity along national characteristics, which was supposedly already found in German history. He pointed to the successful novels of Gustav Frenssen or Walter Claussen, which portrayed a German Jesus (Smend, 1906, 87). The professor of practical theology Friedrich Niebergall appreciated these endeavours: ‘Did the gospel receive a Palestinian look; we will give it a modern one’ (Niebergall, 1904, 287). The aim was the ‘real encounter’, as Smend put it, with Jesus as a subjectivist experience of God. Similarly, Karl Kühner claimed that the German Jesus achieved, what Kierkegaard once demanded from our religious life, to bring about our ‘simultaneity with Christ’. Even if he dissociated himself from the radical nationalist raving of völkische ideologists, he found a ‘deepening and internalization of Christianity’ in its Germanisation.29 Clearly, Bierck wanted to step in the contemporary discussion on the Wesen of Christianity. Between the historical debate of the Leben-JesuForschung and the numerous assaults on the church dogma in literature and religious philosophy and the harsh critique by Social Democracy, the rift between church Christianity and living religion became palpable. As Adolf Harnack pointed out, the ‘Christological problem’ was the central problem that led to unbridgeable differences in the contemporary theological landscape (Harnack, 1907, 589f.). Consequently, the question of a contemporary Christology became one of the issues on which the conict between liberal and traditional theological world views was fought out. Liberal theologians who searched for a not-dogmatic conception of Christ were vehemently attacked by their conservative opponents. After a series of public lectures on the Leben-Jesu-Forschung in several communities in the Prussian Rhineland, the young Privatdozent

28 Predominantly referring to Houston S. Chamberlain: Kübel, 1907, 39.41; cf. Kübel, 1906/07. 29 Kühner, 1909, 176; idem, 1908, 609.

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Heinrich Weinel of Bonn University had to face an orthodox press campaign. Weinel repudiated the traditional dogmatic constructs of Jesus as Son of God and redeemer; yet he also emphasized the ongoing central relevance of Jesus’ religious consciousness and his unique personality for a renewal of modern Protestantism.30 Pastor Ernst Bunke, editor of Adolf Stoecker’s journal Die Reformation, gleefully described the uproar, which was caused by Weinel’s lectures. Bunke polemically suggested that the modernists would form a church of their own since they did not acknowledge the Protestant creeds (Bunke, 1903, 14 and passim). In this manner, the Lutheran Hans Preuß considered the Berlin exhibition as a ‘peculiar parallel to the reduction of Christ by modern Protestant theology’ (Preuß, 1908, 958). The Berlin exhibition helped to sharpen awareness of these theological conicts. In general, the press reviews gave the impression that the exhibition deeply affected or irritated the majority of its visitors. The commentators highlighted that the painters ‘did their best’ not simply to satisfy Bierck as purchaser of their art, but to full his idealistic demands by ‘employing their full genius’.31 Bierck provided an album that was displayed in the entrance hall of the exhibition and offered opportunity for commenting on the paintings. In the Christliche Welt, Pastor Johannes Werner referred to the entry of an appalled visitor, who obviously came from conservative Protestant background. Although Werner appreciated the attempt to correlate Christian art with modern thinking, he was taken aback as he encountered the gap between the perceptions of Christ presented in the exhibition and conservative Christian attitudes.32 The reviewers generally agreed that the representations of Christ in the Berlin exhibition aimed to offend traditional viewpoints. The ‘Die Kunst für Alle’ enthusiastically declared in the introduction to its article: We have to say in advance that the demands of the initiator [Bierck] will denitely oppose orthodox beliefs [. . .]. The idea of a human Christ will annoy them since they are not seeking for man in Christ but for the holy Son of God, who is, different from the mortal, marked with a gloriole.33

This polarisation was rather welcomed: ‘[. . .] the confrontation with the images will ask decisiveness from the viewers’, asserted Beate Bonus-Jeep,

30 31 32 33

Heinrich Weinel published an extended version of his lectures: Weinel, 1907. Kunst für Alle, 1897, 305; ironically Matthes, 1898, 103. Werner, 1896, 574; the album is also mentioned by Wächtler, 1902, 612. Quote from Kunst für Alle, 1897, 305.

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wife of the liberal referent Arthur Bonus. Bonus-Jeep not only wanted the visitors to become aware of the antagonism of orthodox and liberal views, she was rather astounded by the fact that Christ received such attention in contemporary discourse at all: It struck me that this man could still be a topic of sensational endeavour, two thousand years after his birth [. . .] Everyone, who has been to the exposition, will take home the impression that Jesus still stands in the midst of our modern times.34

There also were doubts with regard to the question how deeply the exhibition would truly respond to Protestant spiritual needs. Orthodox reviews rejected the entire project. In the leading periodical of Lutheran confessionalism, the Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung, the art works were denunciated as ‘subjectivist proliferation’. Similarly, the Stadtsuperintendent of Halle, August Wächtler, saw only ‘grotesquely deformed images’ and protested against ‘single-sidedness, mediocrity and illusiveness’. Wächtler denied that a valid artistic expression of Christian beliefs could be found beyond the church (Preuß, 1908, 958; Wächtler, 1902, 609.612). This stance frequently resonated in reactions of traditionalists. They feared that the show was not seriously seeking for a clarication of Protestant concerns but for pure sensationalism. Wilhelm Nicolai, teacher at the venerable Eisenach Gymnasium, expressed his reservation over the project and questioned if it could really affect truly religious minds. He compared it to public opinion polls researching the religious attitudes of well-known gures and thus trying to either document or to form a public trend. Nicolai agreed that it was well-timed to start a Christological debate, but he could not refrain himself from suspecting the entire project to be ‘a trick’ for the sake of Bierck’s budget.35 The nervous discussion around the Christ exhibition reected a deep-seated experience of crisis among n-de-siècle Protestants. Even though the reviewers represented various and opposing currents within the church, they generally concurred in their discontentment with the paintings. It seemed impossible to attain the envisioned ‘Zeitgemäßheit’.

34

Quote from Bonus-Jeep, 1896, 615. Nicolai, 1897, 179. At the turn of the century, several of these surveys were organized to inuence church politics, cf. Buhmann, 1903. The most inuential of these surveys was launched by Theodor Kappstein, who collected answers to the question: ‘Do we nowadays still have need for a pastor?’ (Kappstein, 1906). 35

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Repeatedly, the critics complained about the one-sidedness of the artistic approaches. The ‘whole personality’ of Christ could not be captured in the paintings. The critics acknowledged the attempts to accommodate the appearance of Christ in contemporary German culture and they appreciated the worldliness of a human, compassionate Jesus. Their general feeling, though, was that the long-lost—and highly aspired— immediateness of religious experience failed to appear. LITERATURE Anderson, Benedict R., Imagined communities. Reections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London, 1991. Aschheim, Steven E., Nietzsche und die Deutschen. Karriere eines Kults, Stuttgart/Weimar, 2000. Avenarius, Ferdinand, ‘Deutsch und französisch’, in: Der Kunstwart 14/1 (1900) 1–7. ———, ‘Der Dom’, in: Der Kunstwart 18/1 (1904/1905) 801–805. ———, ‘National’, in: Der Kunstwart 26/1 (1912) 1–4. Bierck, Theodor, Christus: 9 Maler über die bildliche Darstellung des Heilandes, Berlin s.a. [1896]. Bittlinger, Else, ‘Die moderne Kunst, unser Bundesgenosse’, in: Protestantenblatt 38 (1905) 463–464. Blaschke, Olaf/Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael, ‘Religion in Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Sozialhistorische Perspektiven für die vergleichende Erforschung religiöser Mentalitäten und Milieus’, in: id. (eds), Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus—Mentalitäten—Krisen, Gütersloh, 1996, 7–56. Bonus, Arthur/Perino, Adolf/Schian, Martin (eds), Der moderne Mensch und das Christentum. Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, Leipzig, 1898. Bonus, Arthur, ‘Klingers “Beethoven”’, in: Preußische Jahrbücher 110 (1902) 143–149. ———, Vom neuen Mythos. Eine Prognose, Jena, 1911. Bonus-Jeep, Beate, ‘Eine “Christusausstellung”’, in: Die Christliche Welt, 10 (1896) 610–615. Borkenhagen, Hermann, ‘Religion und Kirche’, in: Der Türmer. Monatsschrift für Gemüt und Geist 9 (1906) 161–163. Brand, Bettina, Fritz von Uhde. Das religiöse Werk zwischen künstlerischer Intention und Öffentlichkeit, Heidelberg, 1983. Bruch, Rüdiger vom, ‘Kunstwart und Dürerbund’, in: M. Grunewald/U. Puschner/H.M. Bock (eds), Le Milieu Intellectuel Conservateur en Allemagne, sa Presse et ses Réseaux (1890–1960), Bern, 2003, 353–375. Brückner, Wolfgang, ‘Trivialer Wandschmuck der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, aufgezeigt am Beispiel einer Bilderfabrik’, in: id. (ed.): Kunst und Konsum. Massenbilderforschung, Würzburg, 2000, 383–406. Bruhn, Matthias/Borgmann, Karsten (eds), Sichtbarkeit der Geschichte. Beiträge zu einer Historiographie der Bilder, Berlin, 2005 (Historisches Forum 5). Bruns, Karin, ‘Die neue Gemeinschaft [Berlin-Schlachtensee]’, in: W. Wülng e.a. (eds), Handbuch literarisch-kultureller Vereine, Gruppen und Bünde 1825–1933, Stuttgart/ Weimar, 1998, 358–371. Buhmann, Hans K.E. (Ed.), Die Deutsche Kirche. Eine Umfrage in Sachen des Zusammenschlusses der deutschen evangelischen Landeskirchen. Beantwortet in Abhandlungen, Thesen und Betrachtungen von sechzig Persönlichkeiten der verschiedenen religiösen und kirchlichen Bestrebungen, Eisenach, 1903.

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——— Expositionen. Geschichte und Kritik des Ausstellungswesens, Munich/Berlin, 1986. Matthes, Alfons, ‘Christusbilder’, in: Versöhnung, 3 (1898/99) 103–106. McDannell, Colleen, Material Christianity. Religion and Popular culture in America, New Haven/London, 1995. Merz, Johannes, ‘Fritz von Uhde: Die Predigt am See’, in: Christliches Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule und Haus 39 (1897) 28–30.42–44. Metken, Ingrid, ‘Nazarener und “nazarenisch”. Popularisierung und Trivialisierung eines Kunstideals’, in: Gallwitz, Klaus (ed.), Die Nazarener, Frankfurt, 1977, 365–388. Molendijk, Arie L. (ed.), Materieel Christendom. Religie en materiële cultuur in West-Europa, Hilversum, 2003. Mommsen, Wolfgang J., ‘Kultur und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich’, in: id. (Ed.), Der autoritäre Nationalstaat. Verfassung, Gesellschaft und Kultur im deutschen Kaiserreich, Frankfurt, 1990, 257–286. Morgan, David, The Sacred Gaze. Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, Berkeley, 2005. Muther, Richard, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, vol. 3, Munich, 1893/94. Nicolai, Wilhelm, ‘Die Ausstellung der Christusbilder im alten Reichstagsgebäude in Berlin’, in: Monatschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst, 1 (1897) 179–181. Niebergall, Friedrich, ‘Zwei moderne Prediger’, in: Monatsschrift für kirchliche Praxis 26 (1904) 282–291. Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 1: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist, Munich, 1998. Nithack-Stahn, Walter, ‘Protestantische Kunst’, in: Der Kunstwart 19/1 (1905/06) 432–437. ——— ‘Luther als Künstler’, in: Protestantenblatt 41 (1908) 267–272.290–295 [1908a]. ——— ‘Religion und Kunst’, in: Die Christliche Welt 19 (1908) 457–464 [1908b]. Osborn, Max, ‘Von deutscher Kunst’, in: Neue deutsche Rundschau 8 (1897), 857–876. Paret, Peter, Die Berliner Secession. Moderne Kunst und ihre Feinde im Kaiserlichen Deutschland, Berlin, 1981. Pauli, August, ‘Protestantische Kultur’, in: Noris. Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Protestantische Kultur 1 (1908) 7–22. Preuß, Hans, ‘Das Christusbild im Wandel der Jahrhunderte. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis christlicher Kunst’, in: Allgemeine evangelisch-lutherische Kirchenzeitung 41 (1908) 906–909.925–928.955–960. R.S., ‘Berliner Kunstberichte I. Ausstellung “Christus” ’, in: Christliches Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule und Haus 38 (1896) 122–126. Rade, Martin [1896a], ‘Die Ausstellung von Christusbildern’, in: Die Christliche Welt, 10 (1896) 671. ——— [1896b], ‘Transparente Bilder aus dem Leben Jesu’, in: Die Christliche Welt, 10 (1896) 958. Roeck, Bernd, ‘Visual turn. Kulturgeschichte und ihre Bilder’, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003) 294–315. Rosenberg, Adolf, Eduard von Gebhardt, Bielefeld, 1899. Scharfe, Martin, Evangelische Andachtsbilder. Studien zu Intention und Funktion des Bildes in der Frömmigkeitsgeschichte vornehmlich des schwäbischen Raumes, Stuttgart, 1968. Schefer, Karl, ‘Ludwig von Hoffmann’, in: Neue deutsche Rundschau 12 (1901) 426– 433. Schiele, Friedrich Michael, ‘Der Dürerbund’, in: Die Christliche Welt 17 (1903) 1051. ——— ‘Kirchliche Chronik’, in: Evangelische Freiheit. Monatsschrift für die kirchliche Praxis in der gegenwärtigen Kultur 7 (1907) 345–354. Schubring, Paul, ‘Die protestantische Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert’, in: C. Werckshagen (ed.), Der Protestantismus am Ende des XIX. Jahrhunderts in Wort und Bild, Berlin, 1901, vol. 2, 809–842.

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Schwaner, Wilhelm, ‘Protestanten’, in: Der Volkserzieher 9 (1905) 72–73. Sell, Karl, ‘Das deutsche Christentum’, in: H. Meyer (Ed.), Das Deutsche Volkstum, Leipzig/Vienna 1898, 335–392. Smend, Julius, ‘Zur Frage nach dem deutschen Christus in unsrer Malerei’, in: Monatschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst 11 (1906) 85–89. Steinhausen, Heinrich, ‘Von Kultur und Kunst’, in: Der Kunstwart 15 (1906) 117–123. Stephan, Horst, ‘Christlich oder Modern?’, in: Die Christliche Welt 12 (1898) 7–13. Stern, Fritz, The politics of cultural despair. A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology, Berkeley, 1961. Thoma, Hans, Briefwechsel Hans Thoma mit Henry Thode, ed. J.A. Beringer, Leipzig 1928 Traub, Theodor, ‘Lichtbilder für die evangelische Gemeinde’, in: Die Christliche Welt 22 (1908) 115. Weizsäcker, Heinrich, ‘Der protestantische Kirchenbau’, in: Die Christliche Welt 8 (1894) 18–23. ——— ‘Zur Würdigung Fritz von Uhdes’, in: Die Christliche Welt 8 (1894) 786–789. ——— ‘Arnold Böcklin. Zwei Aufsätze von H.A. Schmidt’, in: Die Christliche Welt 15 (1902) 132–133. Veeh, Leonhard, ‘Evangelisch oder protestantisch?’, in: Der Volkserzieher. Der Volkserzieher. Blatt für Familie, Schule und öffentliches Leben 15 (1913) 151–152. Veltzke, Veit, Der Mythos des Erlösers. Richard Wagners Traumwelten und die deutsche Gesellschaft 1871–1918, Stuttgart, 2002 [exhibition catalogue]. Wächtler, August, ‘Alte und neue Christusbilder: Eine protestantische Studie zur christlichen Kunstgeschichte’, in: Deutsch-evangelische Blätter. Zeitschrift für den gesamten Bereich des deutschen Protestantismus, 2 (1902) 591–612. Weber, Paul, Kunst und Religion. Eine Frage für die Gegenwart erläutert an einem Gange durch die Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, Heilbronn, 1911. Wehnert‚ [Bruno], ‘Kunst erlöst?’, in: Christliche Freiheit. Evangelische Gemeindeblatt für Rheinland und Westfalen 26 (1910) 728–732.760–763. Weichelt, Hans, ‘Lichtbilder: Uhde, von Gebhardt’, in. Die Christliche Welt 22 (1908) 1178 Weinel, Heinrich, Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Tübingen, 1907. Werner, Johannes, ‘Die Berliner “Christusausstellung” ’, in: Die Christliche Welt 10 (1896) 574.

22. THE WRITTEN ICON: IMAGES OF GOD IN MODERN DUTCH LITERATURE Jaap Goedegebuure (University of Tilburg) This essay deals with texts of three well known twentieth-century Dutch authors Gerard Reve, Hans Faverey and Rutger Kopland. In prose and poetry these authors deliberately constructed alternative and even confronting images of God. In doing this, they were not only aware of the fact that these images were rooted in their own projections, but they also tried, in a poetical way, to discuss the nature of these projections. The rst section of this essay focuses on Gerard Reve and the third section on Faverey and Kopland. In the second section I shall present a few personal reections on the problem of constructing images of the divine, trying to create a context for understanding a considerable number of modern poets as mystics in their own right. Gerard Reve and the ‘Donkey-case’ On 20 October 1966, Amsterdam witnessed a sensational trial. Newspapers were reporting on the case in detail and many reports and essays followed. It was the 45 year-old writer Gerard Kornelis van het Reve (since 1970 better known as Gerard Reve) who was accused of blasphemy. According to the prosecution he had intentionally offended religious feelings. The immediate cause for this charge was a passage in Reve’s Brief aan mijn bank (‘Letter to my bank’). The narrator of this text, obviously the author’s alter ego, imagines himself inviting God to his apartment and having sex with him. For this purpose God manifests Himself in the shape of a one year-old donkey (Reve, 1999, 183–188). Initially Reve was discharged. The court judged that he had committed an act of blasphemy, but took the view that there was not enough evidence of a deliberate, planned offence. Surprisingly, Reve was not satised with the court’s decision. He wanted a full acquittal and therefore lodged an appeal. After having

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been defended by a professional lawyer, he now took on his own defence. The written version of this defence is to be found in his Pleitrede voor het Hof (‘Plea to the Higher Court’), an essay that may be regarded as representing the essence of his religious and esthetical views. Although irony was an omnipresent stylistic device in Reve’s writing, in his essay this was limited to a minimum. The author was absolutely serious in his claim that the image of God and the divine he had presented was as close to his heart as possible. According to Reve God is the most hidden, most helpless, most essential and everlasting facet of our selves. God represents the most unselsh and unconditional form of love. For that reason His love is presented to us as the love of a parent for its children. Because of His love for mankind God suffers and needs our comfort, help and redemption as much as we need His. In Reve’s notion of divine love, sexuality is fully integrated. Furthermore, this divine love supposes a relationship between God and man in which they are alternately dominated and oppressed by the other. In the poem Een nieuw Paaslied (‘A new Easter Hymn’) God is addressed as ‘Master, Slave and Brother’. (Reve, 1999, 326) In this and other writings of Reve his religious ideas have an outspoken sadomasochistic tendency. Therefore we can imagine all too well that there was a clash between his ideas and what most Dutch Christians during the sixties believed to be true and virtuous. What, for instance, would orthodox Calvinists think of a line in one of Reve’s poems referring to the pop musician Stu Stuttcliff (friend of John Lennon and Paul McCartney), who after dying young copulated with God (Reve, 1999, 337). What feelings may have been aroused by other poems when proclaiming the good tidings now that God is masturbating while thinking of Reve, or the vision in which the Virgin is giving her body to a soldier? (Reve, 1999, 325, 758) However, the purple passages highlighting the bestial sex with the donkey-god, Reve considered to be the crowning glory of his work. But at this point the defendant had more than one trick. He refreshed the memory of his audience by recalling the Greek god Zeus mating with women in the shape of a swan, a bull and the like. So, why not a donkey? Isn’t this animal the very picture of innocence, goodness, faith and patience? At this point of his plea Reve handed the judges two postcards representing donkeys resembling the Divine Lamb or Jesus bearing his cross, arguing that only heartless people deprived of any sense of symbolism could reject the representation of God as a donkey:

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‘Wanneer God zich zelf in Zijn Liefde aan mij offert, doet Hij dat op een wijze die symbool is bij uitstek van uiterste, volledige en tevens allertederste onderwerping. Hij geeft Zich aan mij in seksuele overgave, daarbij de soort intimiteit kiezend die, voor mij, boven elke andere verheven is en alle verstand te boven gaat: Hij laat Zich door mij in Zijn Geheime Opening bezitten.’ (‘When in His Love God is sacricing Himself to me, He is doing so in a way that symbolizes the most extreme, most complete and most tender submission: He is giving Himself to me in sexual surrender, choosing the kind of intimacy which, to me, is superior to any other intimacy and which surpasses all understanding: he allows me to possess him in his secret entrance.’) (Reve, 1999, 364)

Curiously enough Reve defended his case by referring to Greek mythology in which sex between gods and human beings was quite acceptable, but he omitted another point that could have been used in his favour, namely the practice of sacred prostitution, common and acceptable in the antique Orient. In other writings, though, he identies the Virgin Mary as a metamorphosis of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility (Reve, 1988, 48–49). I began this paper with the notorious ‘Donkey-case’ because it offers a striking example of the way heterodox images of the divine can clash with religious beliefs, dogmas, rules and conventions. Such clashes and confrontations have always been present and have displayed themselves in all cultures, not to speak of the iconoclashes occurring between different cultures. The latter is, for example, evident in the Jewish taboo on concrete representations of the divine and the human, formulated in the second of the Ten Commandments. This taboo was violated immediately after its proclamation by the erection of the Golden Calf. In the Old Testament there is a perpetual resurfacing of concrete images of an abstract God, for instance in Psalm 18, which refers to God as a re-breathing dragon, or in the book Job where God associates Himself with Behemoth and Leviathan, alias hippopotamus and crocodile. These examples indicate that representations causing an iconoclash are also to be found in old and suppressed traditions. Reve had a valid point when he went to Greek antiquity for shelter, but he seemed to forget that Greek and other mythologies were and still are not appreciated by orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims. Although iconoclashes may be of all times and all places, their manifestation is especially vehement in the art and literature of the nineteenth-

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and twentieth centuries. From the days of romanticism onwards artists and writers have been choosing images that closely connect to their deepest personal identity, even when this identity associates itself with a confronting otherness. Byron claimed to feel at home with the rebel Cain. Baudelaire thought of Supreme Beauty as modelled after Satan in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. Hebbel portrayed Judas as the truest believer because, frustrating as it might seen, he had to experience that in the end his master Jesus shrank away from realising the Kingdom of God in the way he was hoping for, at that time. In all these cases it is quite clear that a complete inversion is taking place of the qualities and values of conventional images of the divine and the sacred. This inversion is a token of the need to act against the grain, characteristic of romantic and post-romantic styles, ideas and ideology. In the eld of aesthetics this manifests itself as a violating renewal of artistic norms and devices. But Reve’s case is also an illustration of another phenomenon rooted in romanticism. The representations of God and the divine, produced by artists and writers, can more than often be interpreted as projections, resembling the inner self. Few writers have seen through this mechanism as clearly as Frans Kellendonk did in his essays on the subject of icons and their signicance. With reference to the second commandment, he rejected an uncomplicated and naive realism and praised irony as the only form by which literary creation can function. (Kellendonk, 1992, 847–860) For literature is not identical with reality, but it represents an articial world, which at its best is able to invoke the total otherness of the grotesque. The Divine in its Quality of Otherness Thinking about God and the divine—loudly or in silence, as a prayer, a lamentation or as a philosophical problem—inevitably implies some clumsiness. It recalls the image of a child trying desperately to impound the ocean with the help of his beach toys. God is there, but only because our mind is able to imagine the category of the unthinkable. God is there because our language has created room for Him or Her or It, but anything we say, remains a desperate attempt to make the unknowable familiar, fence It, Her, Him in. We pretend to know what love is and that’s why we call God Love. We all (used to) have a father, and according to our experiences and

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memories we regard God either as a caring parent or a relentless patriarch. Before our eyes, as if gazing in a dark mirror, inexplicable by senses, reason or technique, God takes on all shapes and forms. And when we progress slightly in knowledge and insight, God hides again, mystifying the already mysterious. As such God dwells on the other side of the abyss where our comprehension fears to tread. In order to venture into this unlimited zone, we have to surpass all human measures. Through the ages man has attempted in all different ways to catch a glimpse and grasp the nature of this mystery zone. The positivist philosophers, claiming a disinterest in God because the concept of ‘God’ makes no logical sense are, at least in my opinion, short sighted. The axiom saying that God is not falsiable and therefore represents a meaningless category tells us more about positivism than about the concept God. It could be argued that Wittgenstein was the only one amongst them who understood that one has to remain silent about things one cannot speak of. He joined those mystics who remained silent, only to open their mouths for a few stammering words about burning res or nights as cold as ice. Silence becomes us, even though it is impossible not to speak. We explore the universe with our white stick, yearning for views and horizons we are never supposed to probe. In this context questions arise, such as: What precisely is our relationship with God? Are we creatures made after God’s image and likeness, as we read in the rst chapter of Genesis? Or are we not more than an evasive thought in a brain wider and larger than universe itself ? In my opinion these and other metaphors are all too narrow, rooted as they are in the poor human frame of mind. God is alien or He is not. Considering this, I wonder if it is possible to make any statement about God that is not belittling. I don’t think so, because the complexity of God is out of reach as far as our language and mental comprehension are concerned, and thus He always escapes our image and likeness. If we still feel the urge to utter something, we do so because of an insatiable need for safety and comfort, justication and stability; failing to see that God’s world was and still is without form and void. At the beginning of earth’s history there is man and not God. And the Bible is written in our words, not God’s. However, every now and then we claim to catch glimpses of that divine, formless wasteland. The God whom the Israelites encountered on their Exodus to the Promised Land was the opposite of everything they were willing to expect and experience. God spoke to Moses

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from a burning bush and came down from Mount Sinai in re and thunderstorms. But in the bare and desert land that reected God’s nature, they noticed their own fate, as the Italian lm director Pasolini states in Teorema. It was this landscape that formed their idea about God as being one. People who ridicule the beliefs of others often argue that there is a gap between God’s supposed powers on the one hand and his supposed goodness on the other. If God is almighty, how can he permit injustice and cruelty? Why is he tolerating evil and destruction, why is there no evidence of his help, support or even sympathy? Apart from the question whether a good or angry God exists (a question I will not attempt exploring here), this type of reasoning seems inadequate to me. What is the reason to qualify an epidemic, an earthquake or a typhoon as something bad or as something good? They are what they are, just as the divine is what it is. It is our evaluation and it is our idea of justice that undergoes change from time to time. Job rst complained to God and praised him afterwards. The remarkable thing is that the praise came after God explicitly compared himself to the devastating powers of the Leviathan and the Behemoth. This reminds me of another of Gerard Reve’s poems, one that does not speak of love but of ‘God’s horrible majesty’ displayed at daybreak. In Reve’s lines we see a glimpse of God’s light that shines on good and bad without differentiating between the two. Even though it is Jesus who says this, this aphorism seems to be more in line with the wisdom of Ecclesiastes than with the message of the New Testament. Whereas God, in my view, manifests himself as a humanized being in both the Old and the New Testaments in the wisdom literature his character seems to become less anthropomorphic or even indifferent when natural phenomena are involved. Dostoyevsky’s great novels, ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Evil Spirits’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, owe their vigorous strength to the dichotomy between these two images, that of the Old and the New Testament: God as indifferent in nature and God as the loving and caring father. On the one hand we see angels such as Aljosja Karamazov and Raskolnikov’s girlfriend Sonja, a sort of Mary Magdalen(e). On the other hand in his novels there are characters such as Stavrogin who chooses Satan as his god, or the pervert mystic Kirilov who glories suicide as the triumph of free will and believes that in this way he can be like God by committing a murder. It is Kirilov who, anticipating

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Nietzsche, identies God as being similar to the dumb and speechless things existing without any feelings, emotions, fear, guilt—things that are not able to ask themselves questions, things that do not make sense. ‘He who doesn’t care at all if he is alive or dead, will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear, will be God. But that other God will not be there anymore.’ Hans Faverey and Rutger Kopland In the fourth and last section of this essay I shall briey deal with two Dutch poets who looked upon all images of the divine as projections, without cherishing hope of being set free from them. That is why Hans Faverey, one of these two poets, spoke of Hinderlijke goden (‘Annoying Gods’), by which he meant gods that make you feel as if you are being stalked. In his view, there is a need for a denite and resolving iconoclasm, but in the end he sees once more a clash of endlessly reemerging images. In order to illustrate this radical iconoclasm, I will quote a poem based on the question-and-answer structure characteristic of the conventional Christian catechisms. The rapid changes of position held by the ‘I’ and God and the inversion of the usual hierarchy between God and man underline the inescapable and highly ambivalent character of our religious projections. Waar is God? God is overal. Waartoe is god op aarde: om mij te dienen en daardoor Mij te kunnen vergeten. Stierf ik om god te kunnen doorboren? Ja, om God te kunnen doorboren waste ik mij eerst van top tot teen en liet mij tenslotte doorboren door Hem telkens van Mij af te slaan. X Where is God? God is everywhere. For what reason is god On earth: to serve me And by doing so to forget Me.

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jaap goedegebuure Did I die to transx god? Yes to transx God I washed myself from head to heels And let myself transx By pulling Him back all the time. (Faverey, 1993, 520)

Rutger Kopland, the other of the two poets I want to mention here, has so often spoken about projected images of God that it runs through his poetry like a continuous thread. In one of his poems he confesses that as a frightened child he believed in wallpaper: the wallpaper in which he saw the green pastures of Psalm 23. Now, still anxious and disturbed, he gazes at the water and sees the reection of a horse, but looking up again and watching the other side of the river, the banks are empty. The lines which I am paraphrasing here, stem from the long poem ‘G’, a monologue of an “I” addressed to someone who is so perceptibly absent that he actually becomes approachable and nearly tangible, not in a pleasant but in an annoying way: Als je mij dan eindelijk zou kennen, ik zou weggaan G, ik houd er niet van om te worden gekend door iemand die ik niet En ook dat zou je weten, ook dat weer, zeker, beter dan ik. Ik zou je vergeten maar door jou niet worden vergeten. Kijk, daar houd ik niet van, te blijven leven waar ik zelf niet meer ben, je verwinterde Eden, met je boom vol gedachten, maar zonder blad, zonder vrucht, zonder vrouw. [. . .] Ik wist nog niet dat jij er zonder mij niet meer zou zijn, dat jij bestond door mij. Die dagen met jou G, heb ik gemompeld als een schaker, alleen tegen zijn bord, zo hevig tegen niemand. X If you would at last know me, I would leave G, I don’t like to be known by someone whom I don’t And you would know that as well, again for

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sure, better than I do. I would forget you, but not be forgotten by you. Look, that’s something I don’t like, living on where I myself don’t stay anymore, your wintry Eden, with your tree full of thoughts, but without leaves, without fruit, without a wife. [. . .] I didn’t know yet that without me you wouldn’t be there, that you existed through (thanks to) me. Those days with you G, I muttered like a chess player, on his own with the board, so vehemently to nobody. (Kopland, 1999, 105–111)

What Faverey and Kopland are trying to nd words for, touches the problem of an absence that manifests itself so pointedly that it becomes a presence. Their statements are, in a way, the opposite of negative theology—it is a discourse that takes God’s existence for granted, but, at the same time, it realizes that no language is adequate to dene his nature. God does not resemble anything we know of, and for that matter can best be compared with total emptiness and absence. Several mystics thought of God as the absolute otherness, an existence we never can communicate with. The only way in which we can get a little closer to this existence is a type of meditation and spiritual exercise that leads to total detachment. Kopland speaks of this detachment in terms of travelling through a landscape becoming more and more empty and desolate; Faverey oriented himself, as Allan Ginsburg and Breyten Breytenbach did, on Zen-Buddhism, which taught him the concepts and methods of emptying one’s conscience, detaching it from reality—and individuality—from tied ways of perception, and thus reaching a state of inner freedom. He spoke of his ideas in the following poem: Onherbergzame feiten die tot niets meer dienen; die hebben mij gemaakt tot wat ik ben geworden: die houd ik in ere. Feiten bestaan uit niets. Een plas helder water bevat de meeste gedachten over wegzijn. Nog kom ik aangelopen met twee

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jaap goedegebuure handen vol water: hier— God is groot, maar niet groter dan zijn mislukking. Elk woord slikt zich liever in dan zo te moeten zwemmen. X Desolate facts serving no purpose anymore; they made me what I became: it’s them I honour. Facts consist of nothing. A pool of clear water contains most thoughts about not being there. Still I come walking with two hands full of water: here— God is great, but not greater than his failure. Each word prefers to swallow itself rather than to learn to swim like this. (Faverey, 1993, 460)

Faverey and Kopland can be seen as two controversial mystics, dealing with God in an aggressive and defensive but still positive way; positive because they offer him shelter in their language. He is absent, but in his absence he still represents a clashing icon. LITERATURE Faverey, H., Verzamelde gedichten, Amsterdam, 1993. Fekkes, J., De God van je tante, ofwel het Ezel-proces van Gerard Kornelis van het Reve; een documentaire, Amsterdam, 1968. Kellendonk, F., Het complete werk, Amsterdam, 992. Kopland, R., Geluk is gevaarlijk, Amsterdam, 1999. Reve, G., Moeder en Zoon, Utrecht, 1988. ———, Verzameld werk, vol. 2, Amsterdam, 1999.

23. THE NEW ICONOCLASM THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Theo Salemink (University of Tilburg) Introduction In the sixteenth century a Protestant iconoclastic fury raged through a number of countries in Western Europe destroying crosses and images of saints. In the 20th century the Catholic Church in turn waged a battle for some time against images in the church, namely images in the tradition of the Avant-garde. These modern images were said to be profane and blasphemous. Portraying Christ on the cross with distorted limbs or a stylized animal head in expressionist, cubist or surrealistic styles, naked, or as a woman, was deemed degenerate, immoral and a threat to piety. The condemnation in 1921 by the Holy Ofce in Rome, now called the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, of the Belgian artist Albert Servaes’ (1883–1966) Stations of the Cross is a well-known example of this. Another illustration is the church hierarchy’s wariness regarding the Catholic French modern art movement inuenced by Maritain’s artistic vision. It was concentrated around the magazine L’Art Sacré, under the leadership of the priests M.A. Couturier and P. Régamey. The Netherlands had its own affair. By accident a number of lithographs and a Stations of the Cross by the Avant-garde painter Aad de Haas came into the ring line of the Holy Ofce in 1949. This will be analyzed further in this paper. The Catholic iconoclastic fury of the 20th century deviated from the Protestant iconoclasm in the 16th century. It was not about the ancient image prohibition in Exodus 20 and not about the prohibition on representing God. It concerned portraying God in the particular style of the Avant-garde. After World War One this fear lasted for several decades, nally fading away during the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Second Vatican Council advocated dialogue with modern art. Later popes, including John Paul II, followed this new line. While in this rst half of the 20th century the Church spoke of ‘degenerate’ art—a dangerous reference

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to the art politics of the Nazis—in the second half of the 20th century modern art was recognized as an authentic ‘door’ to spiritual reality in a materialistic world. It was seen as an art movement that provided a suitable means of revealing the ‘mysteries of the Catholic faith’ in a modern, secular world. This contribution has a double focus. Firstly I will show that the Avant-garde not only considered itself to be a new art movement, but also a competitive spiritual movement, lling in the void left by churches and establishment politics. It unleashed a battle of images and in a certain sense an iconoclastic fury directed against old forms and ideas. The Avant-garde was a new iconoclasm. Paradoxically it was itself responsible for elevating non-representative imagery to an ultimate reality, which in turn was celebrated in galleries and museums, the new temples of respect (art as an idol). The spiritual impasse to which this new path could lead, perhaps even to ‘retrogression’ to the Catholic tradition and the giving up of art, will be demonstrated by means of a short biography of Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dadaism. Secondly I shall delve into the Catholic struggle against the Avant-garde. Why was the Avant-garde experienced as blasphemous, why was it called degenerate? In particular, I will examine one Dutch case, the Aad de Haas affair in Holland in 1949. Subsequently I will deal with the question of why in the second instance the Avant-garde was embraced and there was talk of an ‘artistic Aggiornamento’ in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Spiritual utopia of the Avant-garde In order to understand the apprehensiveness of the Vatican we have to turn rst to the Avant-garde and its own revolutionary intentions (Klaus van Beyme, 2005). What caused the extremely ultramontane Church to have such strong misgivings? In the beginning of the 20th century the term Avant-garde had taken hold. It is a term from French military vocabulary meaning military vanguard. In 1825 the utopian socialist Saint-Simon was the rst to apply the word to art; artists made up part of the vanguard of the social process for progress. It was also used for the communist party as the vanguard of the people (Lenin). In the beginning of the 20th century the word Avant-garde was used for modern art. The societal hemorrhage of the First World War accelerated the success of this art movement.

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Avant-garde painters in Germany such as Kandinsky and Marc were in direct contact with French artists such as Picasso in Montparnasse/ Paris and Russian artists such as Malevitch and Chagall. They wanted a new art, but also a new man and society, a new worldview and mystic inspiration. They aspired to being in the vanguard of a revolution. This Avant-garde was not satised with the concept of art for art’s sake coming out of romanticism. ‘The historical Avant-garde rejected art as a pure esthetic phenomenon that had conquered an autonomous domain within societal interrelationships. In this perspective art had become a kind of reservation that had nothing to do with life itself or with society. The artist would no longer ensconce himself behind art for art principles and would have to again return to society.’ (Doorman, 1994, 81). If this only had to do with a new language of images the problem would have likely remained limited to the Catholic Church. In the end it was a confrontation with a competing spiritual movement. The Avant-garde considered itself not only to be an artistic revolution which altered that picture language, but also a spiritual and social revolution in those areas where the churches and establishment politics had missed the boat. This was autonomous art as redemption, as the sacrament of the world, art as the new worldview. Herwath Walden described the Avant-garde as such in the First World War. He was the major organizer of the new expressionist artists in Der Sturm, the magazine and gallery on the Potsdammerstrasse in Berlin. All the great artists, painters, writers and poets met there. They included such artists as Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Campendonck and Chagall, poets and writers such as August Stramm, Lothar Schreyer, Walter Mehring, Thomas Ring and many others (Poorthuis, Salemink, 2000, 59–141). The poet August Schramm died on 1 September 1915 on the front, the painter Franz Marc on 4 March 1916, Kokoschka was seriously wounded. Max Beckmann had a nervous breakdown on the front. George Grosz was sent to a ‘Nervenheilanstalt.’ Otto Dix became an anti-militarist on the front. This war generation of new artists, in particular the young ones, is often referred to as the generation of war wounded of the soul. In the trenches of Chaulines, (France) August Stramm, the founder of expressionist poetry in Germany, compared the war to a butcher shop. Have you ever seen a shop in which slaughtered humans are for sale? With incredible violence the machine guns here rattle, slaughtering more

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and more people for the butcher shop, he wrote to his wife. The war was one big shock that traveled deep through the soul of Avant-garde artists. In the war we also nd the birthplace of Dadaism that broke with the Romantic tradition in art. The paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix exposed the insanity of war and the new Germany with its anarchy of feeling and form, chaos and fracture. The war with all its horrors was the birthplace of the Bauhaus as well. The total collapse at the end of the war provided new opportunities for new art. There was a longing for mysticism and at the same time for Neue Sachlichkeit and faith in progress. All this took place within a community of creative artists working for a new world.1 The well-known artist Wassily Kandinsky expected complete collapse as early as 1912. He wrote that cosmic vibration and sound (Klang) were the foreboding of radical change. Art, in addition, had a prophetic function. In the Great War (1914–1918) he made new icons and together with Franz Marc founded already in 1912 the new ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ movement. Kandinsky wrote about spirituality in art and had apocalyptic expectations at the acme of the bourgeois culture. He wrote in Der Sturm in 1912 that ‘in momentous times’ the spiritual atmosphere is such that the artist easily becomes a prophet: ‘The great periods of change are times when one’s inner maturity is hidden from supercial eyes and the spiritual pendulum provides an invincible thrust.’ (Brühl, 1983, 335) In the Blaue Reiter Almanach (1912) Kandinsky published his text Über die Formfrage. In the same year he published the famous essay On the Spiritual in Art (1912). In this work he talked about a ‘prophetic function’ of modern art for the spiritual life of the people. Art is not an echo or mirror of real life, but has the responsibility to wake people up and to stimulate their spiritual lives. He closed his essay as follows: ‘We see already before us an age of purposeful creation, and this spirit in painting stands in direct, organic relation to the creation of a new spiritual realm that is already beginning, for this spirit is the soul of the epoch of the great spirituality.’2 According to Kandinsky and Marc the traditional churches had neglected their original purpose. Kandinsky said that Catholics, Protestants and Jews ‘had in reality become atheists’ That is to say that the

1 Several publications we consulted: J. Adler, 1990; Brühl, 1983; Marc, 1987; Müllhaupt, 1991; Neumann, 1985; Roters, 1983; Winter, 1995. 2 See W. Kandinsky, 1982, 131–132 and 219 (Quote).

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churches no longer brought the word of the spirit with verve. It was up to the Avant-garde and modern artists to create a new spirituality at a time in which ‘heaven is empty’ and ‘God is dead.’3 Kandinsky, just as Piet Mondriaan, was inuenced for a time by the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, but later became critical of this school. His spiritual inspiration remained, however. Franz Marc wanted to establish alternatives for this new spiritual religion. He believed that the new art also had to be a new mysticism. In the Blaue Reiter Almanach he talked about a revolution in art of the ‘new savages’, which would provide humanity with new spiritual goods, that is to say new ‘spiritual ideas’. ‘We’re at the point, he wrote, ‘an der Wende zweier langer Epoche’. The new paintings are ‘Feuerzeichen von Wegsuchenden’.4 Paul Klee put these ideas into other words in his text Schöpferische Konfession (1920): ‘Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar’. Behind the visible the painter has rendered visible a different reality, a ‘formal cosmos’, ‘der mit der grossen Schöpfung solche Ähnlichkeit aufweist, dass ein Hauch genügt, den Ausdruck des Religiösen, die Religion zur Tat werden zu lassen.’ This artistic creation of a formal cosmos puts us in contact with the ‘nal things’.5 Then there is Kazimir Malevich with his famous paintings (suprematism), as seen in ‘Black Square’ (1915) and ‘Black Cross’ (1915). Malevich’s spiritual paintings are in the long tradition of image prohibition. Abstract painting shares the Jewish and to some extent Christian wariness of representing God in human images, and believes that its new abstract images are more suitable for making the divine in its purest form accessible without the danger of idolatry or adoration. Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ is an example of this new, secular form of iconoclasm. It is not only an esthetic form, not only in color and material and size, but a living ‘organism’, ‘a depiction of God as the essence of His perfection’, said Malevich. The ‘Black Square’, one of the great icons of the Avant-garde, can then be seen as the abstract face of God in a secular world. But these new symbols, although certainly inuenced by the tradition and theology of Russian icons, are no longer under the supervision of the old churches, but themselves are creating a new,

3 See the particularly informative book: Rombold, 1988, 120–124. The book can be seen against the background of the activities of the magazine Kunst und Kirche. 4 Der Blaue Reiter. Herausgegeben von Wassily Kandinsky und Franz Marc (1912), München/Zürich 2004. 5 P. Klee, 1976, 118–122.

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modern religion (Drutt, 2003, 89–95). The ‘Black Cross’ is meant to contribute to this new religion of the modernity, at the same time remaining a reference to and adaptation of the Christian symbol of the cross, suffering and redemption (Malevich, 1989). Malevich, under pressure from the communist authorities, later went on to creating fresco-like hero gures. Expressionism, a particular movement within the Avant-garde, has used the classical Christian symbol of suffering to create a new vision and new emotion. With intensied shapes and colors, with disgured human gures and frequent excessive use of materials, this movement aimed to display emotions, suffering, human fate and tragedy in the insane times of world war and massive slaughter. Expressionism is not about pious mysticism, but about rage, indictment and compassion as well as desperation and embittering. Expressionism as a style appeared to be especially appropriate for the representation of religious themes in a new picture language, in particular suffering, crucixion and the portrayal of the death of Christ. Here to some extent the pre-modern Expressionism of the Isenheimer Altar by the painter Mathias Grünewald was continued. A number of Expressionist painters depicted Jesus’ suffering. They included Emil Nolde’s ‘Evening Meal’ (1909), Lovis Corinth’s ‘Red Christ’ (1922) and Georges Roualt’s’ ‘Ecce Homo’ In my opinion, this Expressionist tradition also includes Francis Bacon in spite of his longing for the absurd. The ‘Stations of the Cross’ (1921) painted by the Belgian artist Albert Servaes (1883–1966) ts into this tradition as well. As previously mentioned Servaes’ ‘Stations of the Cross’, mirroring the horrors of the First World War, was banned by the Holy Ofce in spite of prominent defenders such as Jacques Maritain and the Dutchman Gerard Brom. Christ could not be allowed to be depicted in this ‘disgusting’ way. This pretentiousness of the Avant-garde, both as a new art and as a new spiritual-political movement, naturally encountered resistance from artistic and Church circles as well as from conservative and extreme right wing groups. The catchwords of the national-socialists about ‘Entartete Kunst’ were not only to be found in their own circles. The situation changed after 1945. The status of the Avant-garde was unmatched. Its new images became the icons of modernity, its artists the new prophets. The Avant-garde was transformed from the vanguard to a dominant movement with an extensive art trade, high prices and fossilized museums.

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In the new millennium philosophers came to the fore criticizing the sterility of this modern art with its obsession with constantly creating something ‘new’, with the tendency to conceptualization instead of traditional beauty. The question is whether modern art has not reached a dead end, analogous to the crisis of the modern ‘Myth of progress’ and of the belief in the autonomous, unique subject. Criticism of the original utopia of a spiritual revolution against modernity is not, however, a theme in the modern debate. Modern art is reproached for being a consequence of modernity with its concomitant holy belief in progress. This criticism has a great retro-character; a nostalgia for the unparalleled beauty of the painters in the Renaissance and Golden Age (Comte-Sponville, Ferry, 1998). Hugo Ball A completely different crisis of the Avant-garde became visible in the bosom of the founding fathers of the Avant-garde themselves, and right from the beginning. Can spiritual upheaval really be achieved by the new art itself ? Or does the iconoclasm of the Avant-garde lead to a dead end? How can Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ or ‘White Square’ show the way to a new spirituality and its concomitant social revolution? Will this empty, profane spirituality without any foundation in established religious experience, truth and revelation, and without wanting to be an image of reality, not end in ‘nothingness’, in chaos and meaninglessness, in a spiritual ‘void’? A pertinent example of this religious crisis deep in the Avant-garde itself is the career of one of the founders of Dadaism, Hugo Ball. Appearing in the period around World War One, Dadaism can be considered the most radical representative of the Avant-garde. People in Dada circles talked about going back to a ‘Paradise language’, to ‘creative art.’ The artist Janco said, ‘Creative art is an art of creative instinct, an heroic art including both the seriousness and coincidence of human nature. Dada regarded art as an adventure of liberated humanity’ (Richter, 1973, 49). The abstract sound poems and Dadaist wild language in and after the horrors of World War One are extreme forms of the iconoclasm of the Avant-garde. This is no longer about replacing old images with new images. We now see both the destruction of old images and misgivings about art for art’s sake. We see

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fundamental criticism of the political use of images in modern war and politics as well as an attack on bourgeois culture as such. Dadaists want an ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ in which beauty is found in the ugly, in everyday life, in refuse and in dung, as postulated by Kurt Schwitters. One of the founders of Dada, Hugo Ball (1886–1927), makes clear what kind of radical iconoclasm they coveted, while his biography shows that for him this secular iconoclastic fury and secular spiritual movement terminated in a dead end. In the course of time he experienced the ‘emptiness’ of this iconoclasm and returned to the Catholic Church, with the mystic tradition of the ancient monks. He abandoned modern art and believed that the body of the ascetic is more a battleground of spiritual regeneration than a modern painter’s canvas. He deemed their asceticism to be a greater work of art than paint on a canvas or a performance in a studio. Hugo Ball studied philosophy, was extremely interested in Nietzsche’s ideas and advocated a revolutionary culture in a period when God was dead. Between 1910 and 1914 he plunged into the theater world. The revolutionary works of Frans Wedekind had a huge inuence on him. He linked up with Avant-garde artists in Germany seeking innovative theater that could produce a new society. He became a director in Munich. Ball was a great admirer of Picasso and Kandinsky and saw them not only as painters, but also as the priests and prophets of a new era. The outbreak of the First World War made a deep impression on him although he was exempted from military service. He met the artist Emmy Hemmings (1885–1948) with whom he had a lifelong relationship. In 1915 Hugo Ball and Emmy Hemmings ed to Zurich. With artistfriends such as Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara he started the Cabaret Voltaire. In this café artists presented their experiments in which word and image were stripped down—just as the times in which they were enveloped—to total nakedness in order to discover a new world away from the chaos around them. Hugo Ball: ‘The artists have searched within their own being. Their world was a struggle against the absurd. One can only understand them if one breaks completely with the tradition of the past centuries. We don’t understand them if we believe in God and not in chaos (Courtois, 1956, 9). This cabaret was followed by the establishment of the Gallery Dada. On 12 July 1916 Ball wrote that Dada no longer believes that it is possible to experience things from one point of view. The Great War had destroyed the harmony of things. The new image was splintering, disintegration, coincidence, fragmentation and destruction. He held that

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well-ordered speech had become useless against this fragmentary, threatening world. A new language was necessary, a language of fragmentation and absurdity, breaking the common language down to its sound, abstract images and new music. These were the forms with which Dada dealt in disintegrating times, hoping to nd new meaning and a way out of the chaos. The most extreme form of the Avant-garde are Kurt Schwitters’ and Hugo Ball’s abstract ‘sound poems’ known as Ursonate. On 23 June an historic performance took place. In the previous months Ball had discovered that the language of the poet-writer in a period of degeneration must be stripped of all its coherence and meaning. It must be reduced to sound and rhythm leading to new creativity, to the abstract language that is suited to abstract times. Words, sounds and letters, free of their conventional meaning, create a new world, at the same time returning to their primitive signicance and basis. Hugo Ball appeared in an unusual costume. He was clothed from his knees to his chest in a cylinder made of glossy blue paper as if he were an obelisk. Over his shoulders hung a large loose tting paper cape, bright red on the inside and gold on the outside. With his arms he was able to move the cape as the wings of an angel. A large cylindrical medicine man’s hat with blue and white stripes perched on his head. In this strange costume he couldn’t walk and had to be lifted onto the stage. Three manuscripts written in red ink had been placed on three music stands. Illuminated by a glaring spotlight he began to recite his sound poem ‘Elephant Caravan.’ There was only sound and rhythm, no contents and no meaning: Jolifanto bambla oo falli bambla Grossiga m’pfa habla horem Égriga goramen Higo bloiko roessoela hoejoe Hollaka hollal Anlogo boeng Blago boeng Blago boeng Bosso fataka U uu u Sjampa woella woessa ólobo Hej tatta goorem Esjige zoenbada Woeloeboe ssoesboedoe oeloe wassoebada Teomba ba-oemf Koesa gauma Ba-oemf (Ball 1922, 105)

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Ball wrote in his diary that by the end of his performance he had reached an impasse. Where would this total dissection of the language, this ight into sound and rhythm, lead? Would it end in total absurdity? In his manuscript Tenderenda der Phantast, rst published in 1967, some of his desperation came to the surface. ‘Oh Lord, may the eternal seed deliver us a good Cordial Medoc and the orchestra of the three beaked water pipes be quiet for a moment. . . . With holy water they shall sprinkle me. . . . King’s ass and Schismaticus they shall call me. In nomine patris et lii et spiritus sancti.’ (Ball, 2000, 68) During his performance Ball chose a way out that paved the way for his return to Catholicism. He wrote in his diary that during his recital of this ‘empty’ poem he couldn’t help reecting on his Catholic youth and on the lamentations at a requiem mass. His voice took on the tone of Gregorian and Catholic chants bestowing a deep religious tone on his performance. The chaos of the world and the absurdity of his own performance conjured up old church traditions. The people present would have understood this as a style, if they had observed it at all, but for Ball it was a deeply felt religious necessity. At the end the lights went out and he was carried from the stage in total darkness; in his own words, ‘covered with sweat as a magical bishop.’ (Ball 1992, 106) The religious signicance of what has been called the pinnacle of early Dada ts in with what Ball wrote in his diary three weeks later, on 12 July 1916. Dada opted for the perspective of fragmentation and absurdity because the world had fallen apart, but Ball himself was so convinced of the ‘feeling of solidarity among all creatures’ that he suffered from all the dissonances, up to and including self-destruction (Selbstauösung) (Ball, 1992, 99, 306–308). By doing this Ball pointed out the mystical efforts of the Dada movement to resurrect lost unity by means of art. He saw the artist as a kind of Christ that would sacrice himself if necessary. Ball concluded that modern art ultimately could not provide a satisfactory antidote to the disintegration of the era. He sought the solution in other directions. Initially he turned to politics and became a journalist for Freie Zeitung in Bern. In 1919 he published Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz, however this political road led to a dead end. He saw how the Russian revolution of 1917 derailed and the socialist upheaval in Germany failed. In 1919 he returned to the Catholic religion of his youth. On 12 December 1919 he wrote in his diary: ‘This evening I sang the Credo with conviction. So often in recent weeks I have felt that longing coming on: Credo in unum Deo! . . . These words daze me. The world of my childhood years is resurrected. A struggle

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is unchained within me. I bow very deeply and I fear unworthy of this life. In the past I would never have been able to believe in such things. Able to believe, able to believe.’ (Ball, 1992, 256) Ball married his companion, Emmy Hennings, and took leave of politics. ‘In the war we have lived in the kingdom of Satan’, he said; ‘now we have to do the opposite, reconstruction with God. Without God we can certainly ght for wage increases, but not for ideas. Without the gospel’s ideas of life and peace new ideas can never be victorious. Without the restoration of religion renewal is impossible. They who want to struggle for the people and for the emancipation of the people must have a philosophy of sacrice.’ (Courtois, 1956, 13). In this new phase Ball turned to the Catholic Church of his youth, not to the Church of prelates and institutions, but to the ascetic-mystical tradition of the early Christianity that was especially to be found in the long history of monks. He believed that monks struggled in both their bodies and in their characters against the chaos of the age and the demons of this world where art counts in imagery and word. It is then understandable that Ball said farewell to the experiments of Dada and the Avant-garde. He and his wife retreated to the village of Agnuzzo in Switzerland and with great passion delved deeply into the ancient Acta sanctorum, in particular the Vita of the early monks. There Ball discovered the life of the deed that in his eyes provided the true answer to the woes of the times. The ascetic was the authentic Dadaist, he believed. While the artist ghts the demons of the age with imagery and language, the ascetic does that with his own esh and blood. In 1923 Ball wrote the book Byzantische Christentum. He also studied the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Oegema, 1999, 106–111). He looked into a form of ‘integral Catholicism’ such as propagated by the non-conformist Catholic writer Léon Bloy. Texts by this writer had already been read aloud in Atelier Dada. Ball believed that only this integral Catholicism could give voice to the Logos in the midst of the chaos of modern times (Ball, 1992, 273). In 1924 he went on a pilgrimage to Rome and wrote a biography of his good friend Herman Hesse: Herman Hesse. Sein Leben und sein Werk (Münich, 1927). In 1921 he published a heavily edited version of his own diaries for the years of 1914–1921 with the programmatic title of Flucht aus der Zeit. Ball died on 14 September 1929 at the age of 41. Hugo Ball traveled a road similar to that of the Jewish poet Sophie van Leer, who was involved with Der Sturm and lived with George Muche, later one of the teachers at the Bauhaus. It is likely that Hugo

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Ball and Sophie van Leer met each other; in any case they both knew dadaist Hans Arp well. Sophie van Leer saw also in art a new redemption, then turned to politics during the First World War. She became an anarchist in the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich in 1919, was in danger of being executed after the victory by the white troops and converted to the Catholic faith. She replaced the Avant-garde as the vehicle for revolution with the mysticism of Catholic dogmas. In Van Leer’s case we again see the Avant-garde in her spiritual-political revolution ending in a dead-end street (Poorthuis, Salemink, 2000). Vatican wariness A totally different confrontation between the Avant-garde and religion emanated from the established Catholic Church. In light of the spiritual pretensions of the Avant-garde it was not surprising that the leadership of the ultramontane Catholic Church in the rst half of the 20th century was wary of allowing admission to the Church of this new art. The fact that one of the founders of Dadaism Hugo Ball—well known in Church circles and apologetic—went back to the Church did not diminish this wariness. Following the Second World War this confrontation reached new heights, as well as an end. On 7 April 1949 Mariano Cordavani, a consultant to the Holy Ofce in Rome, authored a piece called ‘The theology of sacred art’ in Osservatore Romano that set forth fundamental criticism of modern art.6 This article contained a theological vision of what is ‘healthy’ and what is ‘degenerate’ art. The ‘larva-like distortions’ of modern art are insulting to the dignity of religious subjects. The words ‘pathological art’ and ‘monstrous art’ were used. The writer recalled affairs in 1946 when Italian artists exhibited ‘distorted images’ in Rome. He also explicitly referred to the condemnation of the Stations of the Cross painted by Albert Servaes in 1921 and criticized the lithographs of the Dutch artist Aad de Haas that were included in a collection of Passion sermons by the Redemptorist Gerard Mathot (see below). He then went a step further when he described a much larger conict. ‘How can they explain the fact that in the Christian world a pathological anti-Christian art is going

6 Dutch translation in Katholiek Bouwblad 28 mei 1949. Another translation— probably by Mathot- is to be found in Father Mathot’s archives (KDC Nijmegen), inv. no. 753.

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around that damages the faith, profanes the Church, compromises religious feelings and evokes reactions that condemn these images in every well-balanced human being?’ The answer according to the writer is that the mutual ‘adultery’ of modern art and faith is a symptom of a much wider moral ‘deterioration’ of modern man as such. Modern man no longer has any interest in the mystery that supersedes nature. And that’s just what sacred art ought to do. It must transform natural beauty without deforming it. Sacred art, unlike other art, should possess the ability to express moral and spiritual beauty ‘in the form of sensual beauty that is not easy to capture in lines of natural phenomena.’ The writer believed, furthermore, that art ought to be tied to morals and the leadership of the Church. ‘In the name of the freedom of the artist’, art should not run counter to history, theology, the gospel, the faith and morality. Should it do so, then we are dealing with ‘pathological subjectivism’, according to the Osservatore Romano. Mariano Cordovani agreed with the judgment of Pope Pius XI in 1932. He quoted the Codex of 1917, that states ‘no unusual images may be situated in a holy place without the consent of the bishop’ (canon 1279). He also referred to the Council of Trente in the sixteenth century. In 1563 the Council had issued a decree on the worshipping of saints and on the use of statues. In this decree the iconoclastic vision of Calvin was rejected. At the same time the use of statues in the Church was subjected to stringent theological and moral preconditions to prevent excesses as in the Middle Ages. (See John Hallebeek’s contribution in this book). Cordovani capitalized on this old intervention used against Calvin in a new setting. He took a position against the admission of the Avant-garde in Church art of the 20th century. On the one hand he avoided a total prohibition, on the other he was for special rules for ‘sacred art’ within the church and liturgy. In particular, Cordovani also referred to the papal encyclical Mediator dei et hominum (1947). This encyclical concerned the liturgy, architecture, sculpture and painting inside churches: ‘Thus modern art will be able to join its voice to that wonderful choir of praise to which have contributed, in honor of the Catholic faith, the greatest artists throughout the centuries. Nevertheless, in keeping with the duty of Our ofce, we cannot help deploring and condemning those works of art, recently introduced by some, which seem to be a distortion and perversion of true art and which at times openly shock Christian taste, modesty and devotion, and shamefully offend the true religious sense. These must be entirely excluded and banished from our churches, like anything else that is not in keeping

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with the sanctity of the place (Code of Canon Law, can. 1178.).’7 In the background we can hear a rejection of the Catholic French modernization movement, founded by Jacques Maritain, in the domain of art and concentrated around the journal Art Sacre (1936) under the leadership of the priests M.A. Couturier and P. Régamey. For the Vatican it was not simply a question of a few incidents shortly after World War Two, this was more than a local conict. In the period just after 1945 the Vatican was resisting modernity in theology, liturgy and sacred art. This was a major effort to keep modernity out of the Church. The battle against the Avant-garde was one part of this. It was part and parcel of the third anti-modernity wave within the Catholic ultramontane tradition. It was no coincidence that the intervention of the Holy Ofce against modern art took place just after and before the two great anti-modern encyclicals in the middle of the century: Mystici Corporis Christi (1943) and Humani generis (1950). In the rst encyclical, published in the middle of the war by Pius XII the Church was designated the ‘mystical body of Christ’, the antithesis of the ‘political bodies’ of national socialism, fascism, communism and liberalism. It was the religious haven in an ‘insane century.’ In the second encyclical the Church resisted the penetration of modern science and culture into Catholic theology and the Church.8 The Avant-garde in the arts was seen by Cordovani, and also in Dutch publications (see below) as a rotten apple in this modernity and as a ‘pathological art’, ‘monstrous art’, a ‘degenerate’ art which is unsuitable for portraying God. In addition, a dangerous game was sometimes being played by using Nazi terminology: normal as opposed to degenerate. As we know, the words ‘degenerate art’ refer to the large Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich from 19 July 1937 to 30 November 1937. This exhibition was organized by the nazis and attracted more than 2 million people. Well-known Avant-garde artists were sharply criticized. They included Nolde, Kirchner, Marc, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Grosz, Klee, Dix and Beckmann. These artists had inuenced Aad de Haas’ paintings. The judgment of the Nazis was unequivocal

7 Mediator dei et hominum, Ecclesia Docens-reeks, Amsterdam 1948, nr. 193. The word ‘degenerate (ontaarding)’ only appears in the Dutch translation, not in the original Latin text where the phrase ‘sanae artis deformationes depravationesque’ is used. 8 It should be mentioned for example that the encyclical differentiated between Darwin’s evolutionary theory that was not unconditionally rejected and the racist ‘polygenism’ that was (nr. 36–37).

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and malicious: this modern art is ‘degenerate’ and is a danger to the pure racial soul of Arians. Other reproaches were voiced as well. The Avant-garde ‘verhöhnt’ the ancient Christian symbols. The suffering of the German soldiers at the front in World War One was treated with disdain. Jewish artists had too much inuence, the Negro and ‘Negro art’ were gloried and the German mother was portrayed as ‘Dirne.’ The Nazis blamed the Avant-garde for desecrating real German art: ‘Avant-garde art was an expression of mental illness, insanity, pathology and spiritual decadence’ (Wulf, 1963, 357–364). Behind this Nazi smear campaign one could nd a much wider, hidden conservative movement in the 19th and 20th centuries striving against modernity and ‘craving for purity’, a purity such as ‘original order’ as opposed to modern chaos.9 Not all the motives behind this attack on the Avant-garde can be found in the Vatican’s point of view, but Catholic writers did make use of the emotionally charged catch phrase ‘degenerate.’ The art-Sacré movement Both the classical Vatican views of art as the housemaid of the Church as well as the reprehensible character of the Avant-garde, led to criticism within the Church as early as the 1930’s. The inuence of the French on this issue was considerable. Even before the Second World War the French philosopher Jacques Maritain defended a new view of art that on the one hand was metaphysical, that is an expression of a ‘supernatural, divine order’, and on the other hand was not subservient to Church principles.10 Although this outlook was not the Avant-garde’s, it deviated from the accepted conservative vision of art in Church circles. God did not ask for Catholic art, but for art that pleases Him; that’s how one could summarize Maritain. It is not art’s function to propagate religion although religious inspiration was deemed necessary. During the interbellum this approach attracted adherents in the Netherlands among artists in the circle around the magazine De Gemeenschap. Following in Maritain’s footsteps a Catholic modernizing movement developed in the arts in France concentrated, as previously mentioned,

9 See van der Laarse, Labrie, Melching, 1998. The conception of ‘degenerate’ had already been rooted in Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892–1893). It was critically used in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen by Thomas Mann in 1918. 10 See more comprehensively M. Sanders, 2002, 279.

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in the circle around L’Art Sacré (1936) under the leadership of two priests, M.A. Couturier and P. Régamey. They believed that modern art should be the starting point for the necessary reforms of religious art. Modern artists had to be involved in the architecture of the churches and the arrangement and design of the inside of the churches. Artists were also to be involved in the design of religious activities. These artists need not be Catholics. There were many contacts with artists, including Matisse, Roualt, Le Courbusier, Léger and Chagall. The Dutch historian Jos Pouls summarized the vision of this French movement as follows: ‘It was precisely modern art that had ridden itself of excess baggage and had come to an austerity and intensity of expression that provided opportunities for religious art. In every true work of art there is the question of a religious dimension and the ‘internal ame’ of the artist was of a sacred nature.’ (Pouls, 2002, 136). Abstract art in particular was certainly capable of expressing religious ‘internal life.’ This made it possible for Le Courbusier to design the extraordinarily beautiful sculptured church Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp and for the Jewish Avant-garde artist Marc Chagall to make so many stainedglass windows in various churches in Europe. This movement, however, was viewed with suspicion by the Vatican. On June 30, 1952 The Holy Ofce published the Instructio ad locorum ordinaries de arte sacre. It was a repeat of earlier denunciations; church art was supposed to propagate and to edify the faithful, not to shock. During the discussions words such as ‘degenerate art’ were used. Commissioning art works for the churches by the likes of the Jewish painter Marc Chagall or the ‘communist’ painter Pablo Picasso was going too far for Rome. A Dutch Case: Wahlwiller 1949 One particular affair in the Netherlands shortly after World War Two provides a local example of the international tension between the Avant-garde and the Roman Catholic Church.11 In brief, it concerned the Rotterdam Avant-garde painter Aad de Haas (1920–1972), who was arrested by the occupation authorities for his ‘degenerate art.’ He was released after having spent six months in prison. His friend, the 11 Ewals, 2003; see also: Wintgens, 1984, 167–173; Wintgens, 1976; Bertrand, 1996; Pouls, 2001; Archief Mathot (KDC/Nijmegen), inv. nr. 746, 747, 786.

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Redemptorist artist Gerard Mathot, who lived in the monastery in Wittem found a safe address for him in Ingber near Gulpen in the southern part of the province of Limburg. De Haas and his wife survived the war. After the war he received a commission to paint the walls in the small Roman church in Wahlwiller, near Gulpen. He began in 1946. De Haas also added a free-oating Stations of the Cross. He was a non-conformist artist who belonged to neither the new group of Dutch ‘experimentalists’ (the Cobra movement), nor to the ‘decorative’ artists. His style around 1949 was similar in some respects to Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and James Ensor, but De Haas avoided the inuence of other artists and was wary of being part of the artists’ world. After the conict over the Stations of the Cross in Wahlwiller De Haas moved in the direction of the expressionist style (Van der Lugt, 1999). There was a heated discussion in The Netherlands about the church in Wahlwiller and the Stations of the Cross. A number of right wing extremists in Catholic circles initiated a witch-hunt. The building committee of the Roermond diocese decided on 27 September 1947 that Aad de Haas should be asked to paint another Stations of the Cross. In due time the rst Stations of the Cross ‘was to be removed from the church’ but would be stored outside the church as an example of an early piece of ‘Christian culture. It was a praise-worthy but immature effort to give us a Stations of the Cross in modern picture language that we had been missing.’12 It was a cautious approach, but one in which appreciation for the modern artist was apparent. Even after a request for reconsideration of this vision by Father Mathot, the committee maintained its position.13 Interestingly enough no steps were taken quickly in 1947 to carry out the wishes of the committee for the diocese. That only took place a bit later when the De Haas affair was on the agenda of the Holy Ofce in Rome. The affair came to the fore in Rome as a result of the previously mentioned intervention of the Holy Ofce against a pamphlet published by Father Mathot early in 1949 and illustrated by Aad de Haas. The book came out under the title of In Jezus’ Lijden (The Passion of Jesus). It was not the Passion sermons that attracted Rome’s attention, they were traditional, but De Haas’ illustrations. The Congregation of the Holy Ofce had received

12 Statement from the Building Committee of the Roermond Diocese, ‘The church paintings of Wahwiller’, 27 september 1947, in: Archief Mathot inv. nr. 752. 13 Letter to Mathot 22 May 1947, in: Archief Mathot, inv. nr. 752.

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information from the Netherlands, possibly from the Catholic fascist Albert Kuyle. They put pressure on the General of the redemptorists and via him on the Dutch Church. According to the Holy Ofce De Haas’ images were not suitable for portraying the ‘humanity’ of Christ. De Haas’ woodcuts were considered ‘distorted art’ unworthy of representing the contents of the faith. The pamphlet had to be withdrawn from the book trade.14 The Holy Ofce made this decision on 16 March 1949. The decision, along with the accompanying theological explanation from Mariano Cordovani, was published in the Osservatore Romano on 7 April 1949. Following this intervention from Rome, the bishop of Roermond, Mgr. Lemmens, had no choice but to have also the Stations of the Cross removed from the church in Wahlwiller even though the Holy Ofce’s intervention did not mention Wahlwiller specically. Aad de Haas himself carried the Stations of the Cross demonstrably out of the Church on Good Friday 15 April 1949. He is said to have told bystanders, ‘Now they have added a completely new Stations of the Cross titled: Our Good Lord ying away.’ (Bertrand, 1996, 24). Filled with fury De Haas intended to destroy the painting or to paint something else over it. Due to the inuence of Professor J.J.M. Timmer, who bought the Stations of the Cross for 1,000 gilders, the painting ended up in the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. In 1969 the new bishop, Mgr. Moors, had no objections to the re-hanging of the painting in the church, though he wanted to have the church restored rst. In 1979 a workgroup was formed by F. Hermans, the executive secretary of the municipality of Wittem and an inhabitant of Wahlwiller, to get the church restored and return the Stations of the Cross. On 22 December 1980 the Stations of the Cross was carried into the restored church by R. van Biggelaar, the chairman of the Limburg Art Collection Foundation. More than 30 years after the original incident even the conservative bishop Gijsen thought this Stations of the Cross was more an issue requiring deep meditation than an example of degenerate art. The Passion Plays in Tegelen in the year 2000 took De Haas’ painting as the leitmotiv for new a performance directed by Ben Verbong.

14 Mgr. Ottaviani intervened personally, spoke of caricatures and approved only ‘Christian images’, according to a letter from the administration of the Dutch redemptorists to Mathot on March 23, 1949.

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Albert Kuyle (a pseudonym for Louis Albertus Kuitenbrouwer 1904–1958) played a special role in the De Haas/Mathot affair. From 1946 he criticized both the paintings in Wahlwiller, though he had only seen them in photographs, and the illustrations of the Passion sermons by Mathot. He began his witch-hunt in the Limburgsch Dagblad on 5 December 1946. In the war, the editor-in-chief of the paper, Jo Groen, with a past comparable to Kuyle’s, wrote as the fascist author Bruno Weykamp. Subsequently Kuyle resumed his witch-hunt in the journal Omhoog, the weekly of the diocese of Utrecht and in the conservative weekly De Linie. On 18 March 1949 Kuyle stated in De Linie 15 that the style of Aad de Haas ‘damaged the pure feelings of the believers.’ These paintings were a ‘deformation and violation of healthy art’, in deance of Christian decency, morality and piety. He supported his argument with the previously mentioned papal encyclical Mediator dei et hominum (1947). Who was Albert Kuyle? Before the war Kuyle was part of the new progressive cultural movement of the Catholic Young Artists to which Anton van Duinkerken and Jan Engelman also belonged. At that time his style was that of a modern man of letters as can be seen in his two collections of poems, Seinen (1924) and Songs of Kalua (1927). In the thirties, however, he moved towards fascism, stimulating the extreme right wing to set up De Nieuwe Gemeenschap in which he launched erce antiSemitic attacks on Jews in the Netherlands. Furthermore, he repeatedly published in the party newspaper of Arnold Meijer’s fascist movement Zwart Front (Venema, 1989, 352–392, 562). During the war Kuyle was a member of the Culture Chamber (Kulturkammer) supported by the occupying power. After the war he received a one year suspended sentence and an ofcial publication ban until 1951. Nevertheless publications such as De Linie, Omhoog and Aristo- provided him with space in their columns (Boersema, 1978, 157–173). Kuyle and Groen, however, were pretty much alone in Catholic circles in their venomous attacks. Anton van Duinkerken, the best known man of letters and journalist in Catholic Netherlands at the time publicly pilloried Kuyle and Groen. His defense of De Haas illustrates the essence of the debate.

15 According to editor-in-chief J.H.C. Creyghton S.J. he was not aware of this beforehand and afterwards he had objections to the personal attack on De Haas, not to the theological arguments. He also denied that De Linie had played a role in bringing up the issue before the Holy Ofce: letter of 24 May 1949 to Mathot in: Archief Mathot inv. Nr. 774; see also Boersema, 1978, 169–171; 195–199.

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He accused Albert Kuyle of rancor, brought to light Groen’s fascist past and reproached him for defamation of character. He spoke of ‘organized biased agitation of former members of Zwart Front’. Van Duinkerken defended the integrity and the artistic quality of De Haas. At the same time he recognized the right of the Church to promulgate rules in the Church and the liturgy. The dream of autonomous art and an Avant-garde as a new, spiritual movement in a materialistic world was strange to Van Duinkerken in spite of his appearing modern in his time and environment. He was not looking for a conict with Rome. In a May 1949 speech he told the Federation of Professional Artists: ‘It is clear that these precautionary measures taken by the Church in no way bring into question the artistic value of De Haas’ work. They are exclusively concerned with its practical value, or more precisely, the religious opportunity to use these works of art at this moment. It is nothing more than a cautionary temporary measure, although this measure does affect the artist deeply enough. The measure can be revoked. Let us hope that it will happen now that the true background of this yelping little dog shouting about an ‘unacceptable’ declaration has become clear’.16 Rehabilitation of the Avant-garde did not follow, at least not at once. The rehabilitation of the Avant-garde In spite of the condemnation of the Stations of the Cross painted by Aad de Haas in 1949 the French Art-Sacré Movement received positive attention in the Netherlands a few years later. In 1951 the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven held an exposition of Moderne religieuze kunst uit Frankrijk. Among the artists represented at the exposition were the painters Odilon Redon and Marc Chagall, Georges Rouault, Fernand Léger, Jean Bazaine and the sculpters Jacques Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkine. The exhibition led to sharp debate in Dutch Catholic circles among supporters and opponents. Kuyle’s rancorous tone however was no longer heard. Within a few years the dispute in the Netherlands had been settled. The wariness of the Avant-garde had disappeared.17 16 Speech to the Dutch Federation of Professional Artists, May 1949, in: Archief Mathot (KDC/Nijmegen), inv. nr. 747; De Tijd 4 juni 1949; Letter W. Asselbergs to Mathot 19 May 1949, in: Archief Mathot inv. nr. 769. 17 For a good overview of ‘Art without the Church’ in the Netherlands see de Wal, 2002.

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In the run up to the Aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) the rm rejection of modern art had faded away and been replaced by a plea for dialogue. According to historian Pouls an artistic Aggiornamento had taken place in the international Church (Pouls, 2002,150). The Avant-garde was no longer considered blasphemous. Aad de Haas’ Stations of the Cross and other modern forms of ‘devotional art’ were no longer in the ring line of the anti-modern offensive of the Holy Ofce and the central leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1999 the recently deceased John Paul II published a letter for the modern artists in which he pleaded for an open ‘dialogue with modern art.’ At the same time, interest in religion outside the Church, in the world of secular art, disappeared in the sixties and seventies. No exhibitions on this theme were organized, there were no publications anymore and artists paid little attention to religious subject matter. In this phase a strong anti-metaphysical mood was prevalent. Secularization became more intense and the belief in being able to change the world for the better was dominant. Positive consideration of the supernatural, God or religious themes did not t in with the times. Joost de Wal, who wrote a dissertation on art and religion in the Netherlands from 1945 to 1990 ascertains that after a while, in the eighties, religious themes returned to the culture and hesitantly to art. He mentions the writer Frans Kellendonk and cites the inuence of the German artist Joseph Beuys who combined spirituality and art using classical themes and symbols derived from religious traditions, including the cross. This was a phase in which minimal, conceptual art made room for neo-expressionism in which emotion, biography and religion were accommodated. Joost de Wal speaks of a return to art with ‘content’ in the Netherlands and a rebirth of religious themes. In addition, there was a shift from traditional Christian themes to animism, Zen Buddhism and Eastern religions. New exhibitions on these themes cropped up, including the controversial exhibition Bilder sind nicht verboten in Dusseldorf (1982). In 1987 The American exhibition The Spiritual in Art took place at tthe Municipal Museum in The Hague. A new museum, the Uden Museum for Religious Art, was established. There was another paradox. There was no doubt that the Catholic ‘Aggiornamento’ was open to the modern world and modern art. But, what modernization gave with one hand, it took back with the other. Modernization was accompanied by a ‘progressive’ Catholic iconoclasm inside the church. The images of the ultramontane past, the neo-gothic

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kitsch, even the remnants of the baroque were all removed from many churches because they were deemed to be ‘antiquated.’ But with the destruction of the old, devotional culture, attention paid to images as such, was minimized. This ‘door’ to spiritual, religious reality was no longer available. Conclusion The Avant-garde was a new secular, spiritual movement in a secular society, aiming at change and redemption of the inner self and the society; a society in which the established churches and established politics had failed. Their picture language pushed aside the chaos and division of the modernity on the one hand and made an effort on the other hand to create a new order within the chaos: ‘in the empty refuge’ as the Dutch Avant-garde artist Lucebert called it in a poem. In his book called The Forbidden Images, Alain Besançon described the Avant-garde as a ‘new iconoclasm’ (Besançon, 2000, 7). He draws attention to the Avant-garde as not only a rejuvenating movement in the arts, but as a spiritual-political revolution as well. Besançon sees the Avant-garde as part of a long tradition of iconoclasm. The Avant-garde went further than earlier religious-iconoclastic movements. There was not only wariness concerning the representation of the divine, the struggle over the correct way to represent the divine and the conditions required for a devotional art. Representation as such was a subject of discussion, as was the representation of the divine and nature. The idea that image represents reality was abandoned. There is no representation. The image is a reality sui generis. This insight was celebrated as a new religion. Besançon: ‘It set itself up as an object of worship, celebrated in the museum, where people came to consume mystically the esh and blood of the artist, mediator, savior or theurgist in the form of his work’ (Besançon, 2000, 380). In the ultramontane period the Catholic Church was wary of the Avant-garde, its new picture language and its ‘new iconoclasm.’ This wariness did not come forth out of a theology prohibiting the depiction of the divinity as originally put forth in Exodus 20. That was the wariness of the Byzantine battle in the 7th and 8th centuries and of the iconoclasm of the Reformation. The Catholic wariness of the Avant-garde in the 20th century was different.

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The Catholic wariness was rstly a result of the fear that the modern picture language of expressionism, abstract art, dadaism or surrealism damaged the unique gure of God. Sacred art was identied with metaphysical order and harmony, while the Avant-garde was seen as deformation, demolition, fragmentation and blasphemy. The Avantgarde in the Church was said to be a threat to divine harmony. To put it briey, this was metaphysical anxiety. The Catholic wariness was aimed secondly at the pretentiousness of the Avant-garde that desired to be a new anti-institutional, spiritual movement, a new ‘iconoclasm’ that called every representation into question, at the same time making an image in its purest form into a new idol: Malevitch’s ‘Black Cross’ as a substitute for Christ on the cross. The Avant-garde was seen as a new form of heresy. This Catholic wariness of the Avant-garde was thirdly imbedded in a deep seated Church-political wariness of modernity in the broader sense. The ultramontane movement called this modernity ‘new paganism’. There was also wariness of the invasion of modern thinking and modern culture into theology, Church and liturgy itself. It is not coincidental that this wariness that we come across in the encyclical Mediator dei et hominum (1947), came out between two anti-modern encyclicals, Mystici, Corporis Christi (1943) and Humani Generis (1950). The Church’s wariness also had to do with the moral offensiveness of the Avant-garde and the personal lives of modern artists. In this case the Church’s moralistic wariness goes back to the time of the Renaissance when the puritan Savonarola movement appeared. Modernity, modern art and modern artists are immoral and a threat to morality in the traditional eyes of the leadership of the Church. In the nineteen sixties the Catholic wariness of the Avant-garde disappeared. Emanating from a belief in progress the old ‘images’ of the neo-gothic were removed from the churches (Aggiornamento as a new iconoclasm). It was an era of words, not of images. There was little room for images in this Catholic ‘Reformation’ of the sixties, not even for the controversial Avant-garde. What an irony. The subsequent acceptance of the Avant-garde since the nineteen sixties revived another Christian tradition: negative theology. Modern, especially abstract picture language would be extremely suitable for depicting a non-visible Godhead. Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ can then be considered as a painting in the tradition of the Catholic mystics.

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Primary literature Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, Zürich, 1992. ———, Tenderenda de Fantast, z.p. 2000. Mediator dei et hominum, Amsterdam, 1948 (Ecclesia Docens-reeks). Secundary literature Adler (ed.), August Stramm, Alles ist Gedicht. Briefe, Gedichte, Bilder, Dokumente, Zürich, 1990. Ball, H., Herman Hesse. Sein Leben und sein Werk, Münich, 1927. Bertrand, C., Aad de Haas. De schilderingen en kruiswegstaties in de Sint Cunibertuskerk te Wahlwiller, Nuth, 1996. Besançon, A., The Forbidden Image. An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, Chicago and London, 2000. Beyme, K. van, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden. Kunst und Gesellschaft 1905–1955, München, 2005. Boersema, B.R.C.A., De Linie 1946–1963. Een weekblad in handen van jezuïeten, Amsterdam, 1978. Brühl, G., Herwarth Walden und ‘Der Sturm’, Köln 1983. Comte-Sponville, A., Ferry, L., La sagesse des modernes. Dix questions pour notre temps, Paris, 1998. Courtois, R., Hugo Ball. Leerling van Nietzsche, Mechelen, 1956. Doorman, M., Steeds mooier. Over vooruitgang in de kunst, Amsterdam, 1994. Drutt, M., Kazimir Malevich. Supprematism, New York 2003. Ewals, L., Redemptorist en kunstenaar Gerard Mathot, Voorburg, 2003. Kandinsky, W., Complete writings on art, I (1901–1921), London, 1982. Kandinsky, W., Marc, F., Der Blaue Reiter, München/Zürich 2004. Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935, Amsterdam, 1989. Klee, P., ‘Beitrag für den Sammelband ‘Schöpferische Konfession’, in: P. Klee, Schriften. Rezensionen und Aufsätze, Köln, 1976, 118–122. Laarse, R. van der, Labrie, A., Melching, W., (ed.), De hang naar zuiverheid. De cultuur van het moderne Europa, Amsterdam, 1999. Lugt, P. van der, Aad de Haas. De Collectie, Heerlen, 1999. Marc, F., Brieven van het front, Zeist 1987. Müllhaupt, F. (ed.), Herwarth Walden 1878–1941. Wegbereiter der Moderne, Berlin, 1991. Neumann, E., (ed.), Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse, Köln, 1985. Oegema, J., Lucebert, mysticus, z.p. 1999. Poorthuis, M., Salemink, Th., Op zoek naar de blauwe ruiter. Sophie van Leer, een leven tussen Avant-garde, jodendom en christendom 1892–1953, Nijmegen, 2000. Pouls, J., ‘Tussen Parijs en Rome. De context van een omstreden tentoonstelling van moderne religieuze kunst in Eindhoven (1951)’, in Trajecta 11 (2002) 2. Pouls, J.H., Ware schoonheid of louter praal. De bisschoppelijke bouwcommissie van Roermond en de kerkelijke kunst van Limburg in de twintigste eeuw, Maastricht, 2001. Richter, H., DADA-Kunst und Antikunst. Der Beitrag Dadas zur Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Köln, 1973. Rombold, G., Der Streit um das Bild. Zum Verhältnis von moderner Kunst und Religion, Stuttgart, 1988. Roters E., (ed.), Berlin 1910–1933. Die visuellen Künste, Fribourg-Berlin, 1983.

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Sanders, M., Het spiegelend venster. Katholieken in de Nederlandse literatuur 1870–1940, Nijmegen, 2002. Venema, A., Schrijvers, uitgevers & hun collaboratie, 2: de harde kern, Amsterdam, 1989. Wal, J. de, Kunst zonder kerk. Nederlandse beeldende kunst en religie 1945–1990, Amsterdam, 2002. Winter, J., Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge, 1995. Wintgens, D., ‘De kwestie Aad de Haas’, in: Willemijn Stokvis (ed.), De doorbraak van de moderne kunst in Nederland. De jaren 1945–1951, Amsterdam, 1984, 167–173. ———, Aad de Haas en zijn schilderkunst van 1940–1950, Amsterdam, 1976. Wulf, J., Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation, Gütersloh, 1963.

24. VANDALISM AS SECULAR ICONOCLASM1 Alexander Demandt (Freie Universität Berlin) Summary At September 15, 2005, during the 4th Philosophicum conference in Lech am Arlberg, Alexander Demandt, since 1974 professor of ‘Alte Geschichte’ at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute (Free University Berlin), delivered a lecture entitled: Vandalismus. Kultur im Kriege. In this volume a revised version of this lecture is included, because the editors thought it to be a useful addition to the theme of the Utrecht conference on Iconoclash and Iconoclasm. In this article Demandt presents an bird’s eye view of vandalism in history, beginning with the vandalism that occurred during the reign of the pharaohs in old Egypt and ending with the ‘destruction of culture’ during the First and Second World Wars. He approaches the conference theme by an historical analysis of the phenomenon of vandalism—sacred and profane—as a form of ‘Kulturzerstörung’. He denes Vandalism as the conspicuous defacement and destruction of a structure or symbol against the will of the owner or the governing body. It can be done both as an expression of contempt, creativity, or both. In his view, vandalism should be considered as a ‘secular form of iconoclasm’, and as a ‘Zerstörung von Kultur und Kulturgüter’ (a destruction of culture and cultural heritage). Although originally an ethnic slur referring to Vandals, who sacked Rome in the beginning of the fth century, the term was coined in 1794 during the French Revolution by Henri Baptiste Grégoire, bishop of Blois, in his report directed

1 Alexander Demandt, seit 1974 Professor für Alte Geschichte am Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin, hielt am 15. September 2000 auf dem vierten Philosophicum in Lech am Arlberg einen Vortrag über ‘Vandalismus. Kultur im Kriege’. Eine überarbeitete Fassung hiervon wird in den vorliegenden Sammelband aufgenommen, da der Beitrag eine sinnvolle und wichtige Perspektivenverbreiterung des Themas der Utrechter Tagung zu Iconoclasm and Iconoclash von 2005 darstellt. Wir danken Prof. Demandt für die Überlassung seines Manuskriptes.

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to the Republican Convention, where he used the word Vandalism to describe the behavior of the republican army. In his essay Demandt pays noticeable attention to what he calls Modernisierungsvandalismus (modernization of vandalism) in the nineteenth century. He argues that it is very difcult to construct a full picture of all that has been lost and sacriced in the name of ‘Progress’ during the nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. He writes: ‘Following in the footsteps of secularization, industrialization, the construction of roads and railways, innumerable buildings, statues and books, especially those dating from the Middle Ages disappeared. Wars took their toll too’. In this context, Demandt notes that throughout history the (ritual) destruction of monuments of a previous government or power has been one of the largest symbols, showing the attempt at transition of power. The author shows how the criminal ght against culture is only the reverse side of a criminal culture. In this context Demandt also does not only describe the destruction of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1860 by the English, he also pictures the bombarding of Strasbourg by the Germans in 1870, which destroyed about 300.000 valuable books from the library of the Dominican fathers there. During the same war, however, General Moltke refused to carry out Bismarck’s orders to re up on Paris, the ‘Mekka of culture’. Commenting on the destruction of the cultural heritage by the Germans and the Allied Powers during the two great wars in the twentieth century, he notes: ‘The destruction in France and Italy brought about by the Allied Powers were considered to be a vandalisme libérateur (a vandalism of liberation): it was the price paid for the liberation from the Germans’. From this he draws the cynical conclusion: ‘War crimes are only committed by the losers’. Einführung Am 18. November 1842 wurde in der Bibliothèque Nationale zu Paris eine Neuerwerbung inventarisiert, die für die Philosophiegeschichte grundlegend wurde. Es handelt sich um einen verstümmelten, wurmstichigen Pergamentcodex des 14. Jahrhunderts aus einem Athos Kloster. Der nicht genannte Autor ist der Gegenpapst Hippolytos von Rom aus der Zeit um 230. Das griechisch geschriebene Werk, von ihm selbst Philosophumena genannt, will sämtliche Häresien widerlegen; sein sekundärer Titel lautet griechisch ‘Elenchos’, lateinisch ‘Refutatio omnium haeresium’ herausgegeben 1986 von Miroslav Marcovic. Der

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Kirchenvater versucht nachzuweisen, dass alle Irrlehren nicht auf die Bibel, sondern auf heidnische Philosophen zurückgehen, und überliefert dafür einen Großteil der bei Diels und Kranz gesammelten Vorsokratiker-Fragmente. Der Krieg ist der Vater aller Dinge Unter den Ketzereien behandelt Hippolyt die Lehre des Bischofs Noëtos von Smyrna aus der Zeit Marc Aurels. Noëtos vertrat den Monarchianismus. Er sah in der Trinität nur verschiedene Erscheinungsformen der einen Person Gottes. Dies führte Hippolytos einigermaßen gewaltsam zurück auf Heraklit von Ephesos und dessen Lehre von der Einheit der Gegensätze. Zu diesem Behuf notiert der Bischof anderweit nicht überlieferte wörtliche Zitate des ‘dunklen Denkers’, unter anderem das seit der Veröffentlichung der Philosophumena 1851 zehntausendmal zitierte Wort: ‘Der Krieg ist der Vater aller Dinge, aller Dinge König’ ( polemos pantoon men patèr esti, pantoon de basileus). Diese Übersetzung ist vermutlich nicht ganz richtig. Denn Heraklit fährt fort: ‘. . . die einen erweist er als Götter, die anderen als Menschen; die einen macht er zu Sklaven, die anderen zu Freien’. Das erlaubt die Annahme, dass pantoon nicht sächlich, sondern männlich, im Sinne von zweigeschlechtlich zu denken ist, auf hoi pantoi zurückweist, nicht auf ta panta. Demgemäß ist zu übersetzen: Der Krieg ist der Vater ‘von allen’ (Personen) und nicht ‘von allem’ (allen Dingen). Bereits Hippolytos aber hat die weitere Bedeutung unterstellt, denn er entnimmt dem Zitat die Aussage, dass es einen Vater aller Dinge gebe, der gezeugten wie der ungezeugten, das heißt ‘der belebten wie der unbelebten’. Dies war ebenso die Annahme des antiken Philosphiehistorikers Diogenes Laertios (IX 8), der erklärte, Heraklit lasse alle Erscheinungen aus Krieg ( polemos) und Streit (eris), das heißt aus Gegensätzen, entstehen. Dieses im Prinzip immer bekannte Konzept Heraklits hat bereits (Pseudo-)Aristoteles (De mundo 396 h) auf die technè, das heißt auf Kunst und Technik übertragen. Er ndet Polarität in der Malerei, in der Musik, in der Schrift, eben in der Kultur überhaupt. Dies könnte man unterschreiben, sofern man in jedem Vorgang eine Kraft der Veränderung und eine Kraft der Beharrung am Werke sieht. Innovation und Tradition, teils gegeneinander, teils miteinander, lassen sich in jeder kulturellen Erscheinung nachweisen. Die Form des Zusammenwirkens kann friedlich oder feindlich ausfallen. Der Krieg ist der

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Extremfall. Hier möchte man allerdings Heraklit ergänzen: Wenn der Krieg der Vater aller Dinge ist, dann ist der Frieden ihre Mutter. Das lässt sich weit fassen: Der Frieden ist auch die Mutter aller Kriege. Wird um Sachen gekämpft, könnten wir hinzufügen: Das Ding ist der Vater aller Kriege. Vandalismus Der Krieg zerstört mehr als er schafft, er ist eher der Rabenvater aller Dinge; und der Begriff für die Zerstörung von Kultur, Vandalismus, geht nicht zufällig zurück auf einen Krieg. Prokop von Caesarea (Bella III 5), der griechische Geschichtsschreiber Belisars aus der Zeit Justinians, berichtet über die Plünderung Roms durch den Vandalenkönig Geiserich, den die Zeitgenossen Gensericus, den Ganserich, nannten. Am 16. März 455 war Kaiser Valentinian III. ermordet worden. Sein Nachfolger verheiratete die Tochter des toten Kaisers mit seinem Sohn, obwohl sie dem Sohn des Vandalenkönigs versprochen war. Darauf erschien dieser mit seiner Flotte und plünderte Anfang Juni zwei Wochen lang die Ewige Stadt. Insbesondere der Kaiserpalast auf dem Palatin wurde ausgeraubt. Per Gensericum omnibus opis suis Roma vacuata est—durch Geiserich wurde Rom aller Schätze leer gemacht, heißt es in Cassiodors Chronik. Nicht einmal die vergoldeten Bronzeziegel vom Tempel des capitolinischen Juppiter blieben verschont. Es ging den Vandalen mithin nicht um die Zerstörung, sondern um die Aneignung von Kulturgut. Dass sie nicht alles Metall eingeschmolzen haben, erwies sich, als Belisar 533 Karthago einnahm. Dort fand er nämlich den Jerusalemer Tempelschatz samt dem Siebenarmigen Leuchter vor, den einst Titus nach dem Jüdischen Krieg im Triumph durch Rom geführt hatte und der auf der Innenseite seines Triumphbogens auf dem Forum Romanum abgebildet ist. Er war 455 den Vandalen in die Hände gefallen. Wenn Vandalismus Gewalt gegen Kultur ist, dann ist Kunstraub kein Vandalismus, vielmehr ein Kompliment für Kultur und allenfalls Gewalt gegen deren Besitzer. Frankreich: die Französische Revolution Dies übersah Henri Baptiste Grégoire, Bischof von Blois, als er am 28. August 1794 im Konvent zu Paris die Kultursünden der Jakobiner als vandalisme anprangerte und damit einen Begriff prägte, der in alle Sprachen Europas eingegangen ist. Den Sansculotten ging es ganz

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bewusst um Zerstörung der Symbole des Feudalismus und des Klerikalismus. Ihr Motiv war nicht Habsucht, sondern Rache, ihr Vorgehen nicht im vulgären Sinne kriminell, sondern ideologisch. Die Revolution stand unter dem Motto Guerre aux châteaux! Paix aux chaumières!—Krieg den Palästen! Friede den Hütten! und dieser Krieg wurde nicht nur gegen die Inhaber der Paläste, sondern auch gegen diese selbst geführt. Die Französische Revolution war zwar kein Krieg, wohl aber eine militante Massenbewegung mit kriegerischen Begleiterscheinungen. Sie stand im Zeichen des Fortschritts, beabsichtigte eine Bewusstseinsveränderung und richtete sich gezielt gegen die angeblichen Monumente der sozialen und geistigen Sklaverei. Am 20. April 1791 wurde der Bildersturz beschlossen und mit einer Gründlichkeit durchgeführt, die alle älteren Beispiele für Kulturvernichtung in den Schatten stellte. Die Tatsache, dass hier nicht ein Krieg gegen ein anderes Volk, sondern ein Krieg gegen die Geschichte geführt wurde, gegen die eigene Geschichte und damit in gewisser Weise gegen die eigene Identität, erklären wir üblicherweise aus dem religiösen Substrat der revolutionären Bewegung, ihrem politischen Messianismus, einer IdeenMetamorphose des Christentums. Das Erlösungsversprechen der Kirche hatte seinen Kredit verloren und wurde ersetzt durch die Hoffnung auf ein irdisches Paradies, in dem Freiheit, Gleichheit und Brüderlichkeit walten sollten. Dieses als höchstes Ziel der Menschheit proklamierte Programm rechtfertigte, ja forderte die höchsten Opfer. Zu allen Zeiten wurde Vandalismus mit gutem Gewissen praktiziert. Ägypten Blicken wir von der Französischen Revolution in die Vor- und Nachgeschichte der militanten Kulturzerstörung, so öffnet sich ein weites Feld. Zunächst ist festzustellen, dass Vandalismus im Frieden ebenso vorkommt wie im Kriege. Die frühesten Beispiele aus dem pharaonischen Ägypten stehen im Zusammenhang mit dem Wechsel von Dynastien und Herrschern. Die Kulturkatastrophe am Ende des Alten Reiches um 2000 v. Chr. ist nur archäologisch fassbar. Echnaton sodann zerstörte um 1350 v. Chr. die Heiligtümer von Amon-Re aus religiöser Überzeugung. Messianisch-militärischer Ikonoklasmus traf um 800 v. Chr. im alten lsrael die Tempel der kanaanäischen Vorbewohner Palästinas, die Bilder der fremden Götter. Die Bibel beehlt ihre Zerstörung. ‘Zerstöret alle Orte, da die Heiden, die ihr vertreiben werdet, ihren Göttern gedient haben . . . reißt ihre Altäre um und zerbrecht ihre Säulen und verbrennt mit

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Feuer ihre Haine, und die Bilder ihrer Götter zerschlagt und vertilgt ihren Namen!’ (5. Mose 1 2, 2f.). Der damals zuerst belegte Glaubenskrieg ist eine Frucht des Monotheismus und hat in der Kulturgeschichte seine Spuren hinterlassen. In den von Assyrern und Chaldäern geführten Heiligen Kriegen wird die Auslöschung des Namens der Feinde als höchster Triumph gewertet, doch hat man dort die Götterbilder um ihrer numinosen Kraft willen eher geraubt als zerstört. Griechenland Kulturzerstörung als Krönung kriegerischen Vernichtungswillens nden wir bei den Griechen seit der Einäscherung von Troja, nach byzantinischer Berechnung am 19. Juli 1182 v. Chr. Totale Zerstörung von Städten und Bauten ist mehrfach bezeugt. Als Alexander der Große das rebellische Theben niederreißen lässt, verschonte er nur das Haus des zweihundert Jahre zuvor gestorbenen Dichters Pindar; er betrieb selektiven Vandalismus. Die Griechen zerstörten Bauwerke aus Rache, niemals jedoch aus religiösen oder ideologischen Gründen. Nur eine Ausnahme ist mir bekannt: nach der Vertreibung des Tyrannen Dionysios II. aus Syrakus 342 v. Chr. wurde dessen Palast als vestigium servitutis abgerissen—das nimmt den demokratischen Vandalismus der Jakobiner vorweg. Kampf gegen die Kultur des Gegners war unbekannt, er fehlt ebenso für die Kriegsführung der Perser. Entgegenstehende Zeugnisse griechischer Quellen sind mit Grund angefochten worden. Aus der griechischen Geschichte kennen wir Beispiele dafür, dass Respekt vor Kultur das Verhalten im Kriege gemildert hat. Der Dramatiker Euripides aus Athen war in der griechischen Welt so beliebt, dass im Jahre 413 v. Chr. in Syrakus athenische Kriegsgefangene, die Verse von ihm auswendig wussten, freigelassen wurden, und dass Athen selber nach der Niederlage gegen Sparta 404 v. Chr. nicht, wie Korinther und Thebaner forderten, in eine Schafweide verwandelt wurde. Aus dem Hellenismus kennen wir Fälle von Rücksicht auf die Kulturgüter des Gegners, selbst wenn dies militärisch Nachteile brachte—so Demetrios Poliorketes 305 vor Rhodos. Er verzichtete auf den Einsatz von Brandpfeilen an einer Stelle der Mauer, wo er ein Wandbild des Malers Protogenes zerstört hätte, und musste die Belagerung schließlich abbrechen.

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Rom Die Römer haben in ihren Kriegen gegen die Griechen deren Kunstschätze als kostbare Beute heimgeschleppt, so 212 v. Chr. aus Syrakus oder 171 v. Chr. aus Haliartos. Damit war mitunter Profanierung verbunden; so, wenn der Statthalter Verres in Sizilien seine Villa mit geraubten griechischen Kultstatuen aus Heiligtümern dekorierte. Eigentlicher Sakralvandalismus fehlt auch bei ihnen, nicht aber Zerstörung von Baudenkmälern im Kriege, sobald eine bestimmte Stufe der Erbitterung erreicht war. Die Einebnung von Karthago 146 v. Chr. wird kommentarlos berichtet, die von Korinth im gleichen Jahr empfand man schier als Schande. Beide Städte haben die Römer in der Kaiserzeit schöner wieder aufgebaut. Aus dem Zeitalter der Bürgerkriege hören wir von Denkmalsturz, systematischer Denkmalschutz hingegen beginnt mit Augustus. Sein Freund Agrippa forderte die Verstaatlichung jeglicher Kunstwerke. In der Völkerwanderungszeit wurde unendlich viel an Kultur zerstört, Christen und Barbaren dürfen sich über den Löwenanteil streiten. Anders als Mönche und Missionare handelten Vandalen und Goten mehr aus Unverstand als aus Absicht. Unter den Wandervölkern waren die Hunnen besonders gefürchtet, aber das beruhte eher auf ihrer überlegenen Kampfesweise als auf ihrer Kulturfeindschaft oder ihrer besonderen Grausamkeit. Dennoch war es töricht, als 1934 unter Kemal Pascha Atatürk die Hunnen als die ersten Jungtürken betrachtet und zu Befreiern der Provinzialen vom römischen Joch hochgejubelt wurden (Kara Shamsi Rashid Saffat). Germanien Den Germanen traute man keinen Sinn für Kunst zu. Einem Gesandten der Teutonen in Rom zeigte man ein kostbares Gemälde, das einen alten Hirten darstellte. Auf die Frage, wie hoch er es schätze, meinte der Germane, einen solchen Kerl nähme er nicht geschenkt. Er konnte zwischen dem Kunstwert der Abbildung und dem Marktwert des Abgebildeten nicht unterscheiden, so wie wenn die Sonnenblumen von van Gogh von einer Floristin taxiert würden. In einzelnen Fällen ist uns gleichwohl der für die Zeitgenossen erstaunliche Respekt der Germanen vor antiken Kunstwerken bezeugt. Alarich, der Gotenkönig, verzichtete 396 darauf, Athen zu zerstören, als ihm, wie es heißt, die Stadtgöttin persönlich auf den Mauern wandelnd begegnete. Stattdessen ließ er sich mit kleinem Gefolge in Athen

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begrüßen, baden und bewirten. Theoderich d. Gr. gab sich Mühe um die Erhaltung der alten römischen Bauwerke, dennoch wurden seine Statuen von den Senatoren gestürzt, die Rache für den Boethius-Prozess nehmen wollten. Als Totila 547 sich in Rom gegen die Byzantiner nicht mehr halten konnte, soll er gedroht haben, die Stadt in eine Kuhweide zu verwandeln. Belisar schrieb ihm darauf, dies wäre ein Verbrechen an den Römern wie an der Menschheit, an der Vergangenheit und an der Zukunft zugleich. Dies leuchtete—man glaubt es kaum—dem Goten ein, so gleichwohl Prokop (Bella III 22). Totila zog ab und die Stadt blieb unversehrt. Die ungeheuren Textverluste der antiken Literatur, von der ja neun Zehntel verloren sind, gehen überwiegend auf Nachlässigkeit, und nur zum geringsten Teil auf die Bücherverbrennungen der spätantiken Christen und Germanen zurück. Dass es solche gab, bezeugt die Anekdote von den Herulern 269 in Athen. Nach der Eroberung der Stadt ließen die Germanen die Buchrollen aufeinander werfen, um sich an den Flammen zu ergötzen. Hier handelt es sich um pubertären Vandalismus, der sich gern mit Pyromanie verbindet. Die Buchverbrennung auf der Agora aber fand nicht statt, da es einem alten Griechen gelang, den Herulerfürsten davon zu überzeugen, dass die Athener eben deswegen unkriegerisch seien, weil sie, anstatt sich dem Waffenwerk zu widmen, ihre Zeit mit dem Bücherlesen verbrächten. Nach dem Ende des griechisch-römischen Heidentums haben dann christliche Mönche antike Texte kopiert und uns das vermittelt, was wir überhaupt noch haben. Mittelalter Schuldhafte Kulturverluste während des Mittelalters sind überwiegend dem christlichen Glaubenseifer anzulasten. Schon unter Constantin setzte eine Welle der Tempelzerstörung im gesamten Mittelmeergebiet ein. Der Kirchenvater Theodoret (Historia Ecclesiastica V.38) verlangte, die Tempel zu zerstören, um der Nachwelt keine Erinnerung an das schmachvolle Heidentum zu hinterlassen. Nur spät und spärlich war der Erfolg jener heidnischen und christlichen Kunstfreunde, die den ästhetischen Wert vom religiösen Gehalt zu trennen forderten und in Rom wenigstens einiges retten konnten, während sich Konstantinopel unbefangen mit geraubtem Kunstgut der Heidenzeit zierte. Wo Tempel in Kirchen oder Kirchen in Moscheen umgewandelt wurden, wird man kaum von Vandalismus sprechen können. Der aufsehenerregende

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Bilderstreit in Byzanz (730 bis 787) sodann hat offenbar weniger zerstört, als die Bilderfreunde behauptet haben. Ihre Anschuldigungen bleiben überwiegend pauschal. Dasselbe gilt für die Araber and den Islam. Die durch Edward Gibbon popularisierte Verheizung der Bibliothek von Alexandria nach der Einnahme der Stadt durch Omar 642 ist legendär. Omar soll erklärt haben, Bücher, die mit dem Koran übereinstimmten, seien überüssig und Bücher, die dem Koran widersprächen, seien gefährlich. Die größten Zerstörungen werden von den Mongolen berichtet. Die von ihnen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert verheerten Landstriche haben ihre Ruinen noch Jahrhunderte später gezeigt. Bildersturm und Reformation Umfangreiche Kunstopfer verbinden sich im 16. Jahrhundert mit dem Bildersturm der Wiedertäufer und Calvinisten, der Hugenotten in Frankreich und der Puritaner in England. Ihre Bilderfeindschaft ist wie im Alten Israel ganz überwiegend religiös motiviert und will die Kultobjekte des Irrglaubens beseitigen, der dessen Anhängern die ewige Seligkeit verwehrt. Der Dreißigjährige Krieg mit seinen verheerenden Folgen ist dann aber mehr als ein Glaubenskampf gewesen, hier ging es auch um Beutegier, Machthunger und Rachegelüste. Sie haben sich am schrecklichsten ausgetobt bei der Eroberung von Magdeburg am 20. Mai 1631 durch Tilly und seine Kroaten. Alle Motive verbinden sich schließlich bei den spanischen Konquistadoren in Mittel- und Südamerika, deren Kulturen nahezu völlig vernichtet wurden. Dennoch kämpften die Spanier nicht eigentlich gegen die Kulturen als solche. Diese nötigten ihnen vielmehr Bewunderung ab. Cortez nannte die von ihm 1521 niedergebrannte Stadt Mexiko ‘die schönste Sache der Welt’. Ludwig XIV und Friedrich der Große Ein kulturpsychologisches Rätsel ist die Verwüstung der Pfalz durch den kunstbeissenen König Ludwig XIV im pfälzischen Erbfolgekrieg. Er wurde nicht zum Zwecke der Eroberung geführt—dann wären wohl Mannheim, Speyer, Bonn, Bingen, Oppenheim, Worms usw. nicht niedergerissen, sondern, wie Straßburg 1681, unbeschädigt annektiert worden. Die von Louis Quatorze inszenierte regelrechte Vernichtungsorgie von deutschen Kirchen und Klöstern, von Schlössern, Rathäusern und Städten überhaupt, resultierte aus Enttäuschung: aus der Einsicht, die Pfalz nicht halten zu können. Das war Vandalismus in Reinkultur. Mit

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Recht nannte Jacob Burckhardt den Sonnenkönig ein ‘mehr mongolisches als abendländisches Ungetüm’. Als dieser ohne jede militärische Not Heidelberg 1693 in Trümmer gelegt hatte, ließ er in Notre Dame ein Te Deum zelebrieren und eine Medaille prägen mit der Umschrift Hedelberga deleta: Heidelberg ist zerstört. Der Ludwig gern gegenübergestellte Friedrich der Große hat ebenfalls gegen die Kultur gesündigt. Er nahm im Siebenjährigen Krieg bei der Belagerung von Prag und Dresden keine Rücksicht auf die Kirchen im Schussfeld, äußerte aber nach vollbrachter Tat wenigstens Worte des Bedauerns. Als Revanche für die Verwüstung des Schlosses Charlottenburg befahl er, die Kunstsammlung des schlesischen Königs in Hubertusburg auszurauben und zugunsten des Lazarettes zu verhökern. Der damit beauftragte Ofzier Christoph von Saldern jedoch verweigerte dem König den Gehorsam. ‘Euer Majestät halten zu Gnaden, das ist gegen meine Ehre und Eid’, so geschehen am 21. Januar 1761. Der General verzichtete auf die ihm zugedachte Gnade, sich auf diesem Wege zu bereichern; er blieb standhaft und nahm seinen Abschied. Seinem Andenken habe ich 1997 mein Buch Vandalismus. Gewalt gegen Kultur gewidmet. Von dem bis dahin unerreichten Kulturfrevel der Französischen Revolutionäre war schon die Rede. Napoleon sodann war der größte Kunsträuber aller Zeiten. Er hat die von ihm besetzten Länder für sein Museum im Louvre regelrecht auskämmen lassen. Der Brand von Moskau am 15. September 1812 gilt als heroisches Selbstopfer der Russen, die den Franzosen die Winterquartiere nehmen wollten. Der Ruhm für diesen Befreiungsvandalismus wird dem Stadtkommandanten Rostoptschin zugeschrieben, doch hat dieser selbst die Tat bestritten. Die Franzosen wollen den Kreml von den russischen Brandstiftern gerettet haben, entzündeten jedoch vor dem Abzug ihrerseits die Pulverfässer in den Kellern. Modernisierungsvandalismus Die Kulturverluste des 19. Jahrhunderts fallen überwiegend in die Rubrik des Modernisierungsvandalismus. Es ist schwer nachvollziehbar, was alles im so genannten Zeitalter der Romantik dem Fortschritt geopfert wurde. Im Zuge der Säkularisierung, der Industrialisierung, des Strassen- und Eisenbahnbaus verschwanden zahllose Bauten, Bilder und Bücher vornehmlich aus dem Mittelalter. Doch auch an Kriegsschäden fehlt es nicht.

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Eine der größten Barbareien war die Verwüstung des Sommerpalastes von Peking im Jahre 1860. Während des Taiping-Aufstandes in China soll eine Lorcha-Dschunke unberechtigt die englische Flagge geführt haben, worauf England und Frankreich in China den ‘Lorcha-Krieg’ eröffneten. Im Zuge der als Denkzettel motivierten Repressalien gegen den chinesischen Kaiser erhielten britische und französische Truppen den Auftrag, im Park des Palastes mit seinen dreißig prachtvollen Pavillons und Pagoden zwei Wochen lang nach Herzenslust alles kurz und klein zu schlagen, was asiatischer Kunstsinn dort aus Bronze und Jade, Marmor, Porzellan und vergoldetem Zedernholz zustande gebracht hatte. Am 18. und 19. Oktober 1860 ließ Lord Elgin, der Sohn des Marble-Elgin, den Sommerpalast auch selbst abfackeln. Reiseberichte dokumentieren das Ergebnis. Sieben Jahre zuvor hatten allerdings die chinesischen Taipingrebellen ihrerseits ähnlich in Nanking gewütet. Doch zurück nach Europa! Hier sprachen die Kanonen. Im deutschfranzösischen Krieg wurde dem Stadtkommandanten von Straßburg in formvollendeter Höichkeit die Beschießung der Stadt angekündigt, falls er nicht kapituliere. Er weigerte sich. Daraufhin wurden am 24. August 1870 knapp 300.000 Bände der Dominikaner-Bibliothek durch preußische Granaten in Asche verwandelt. Demgegenüber hat Moltke die von Bismarck und Roon geforderte Beschießung von Paris, dem ‘Mekka der Zivilisation’, wie Bismarck spöttisch bemerkte, verweigert. Beschossen wurden nur Vorwerke. Wir rechnen das Moltke hoch an, obwohl er dadurch eine unkalkulierbare Zahl von zusätz1ich Gefallenen in Kauf nahm, die Bismarck durch eine Beschleunigung des Sieges retten wollte. Bedenkenlos waren dann die Franzosen 1871 in den Tagen der Commune selber: der Fall der Colonne Vendôme, die Plünderung der Tuilerien, der Brand der Bibliothek im Louvre . . . und das alles, während die Preußen, unter strikter Wahrung der ‘Neutralitat’, vor den Toren lagen. Erster Weltkrieg Die Zerstörung von Kulturdenkmälern im Ersten Weltkrieg war überwiegend unbeabsichtigte Nebenfolge von Kämpfen an der Front. Der von England und Frankreich gegen Deutschland erhobene Vorwurf, die Kathedrale von Reims und die Bibliothek von Löwen zerstört zu haben, wurde zynisch zurückgewiesen, gemäß der Devise ‘Die Blume, die auf dem Wege blüht, hat ihre Unschuld verloren’. Ein Opfer des russischen Volkszorns wurde bei Kriegsausbruch die museal eingerichtete

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Villa der deutschen Botschaft in Sankt Petersburg, wo Graf Pourtalès residierte. Die Beschießung Athens durch französische Schiffsgeschütze 1916 hatte bereits begonnen, als der deutschfreundliche König nachgab und abdankte. Erstaunlich, aber aufschlußreich ist die Kriegsbegeisterung von Kulturschaffenden 1914/15. Nicht nur Thomas Mann (‘Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen’) und Rainer Maria Rilke (‘Fünf Gesänge’) haben das Hohe Lied des Krieges gesungen: ‘Hei1 mir, dass ich Ergriffene sehe . . .’ Auf den offenen Brief von Romain Rolland an Gerhart Hauptmann über den mangelnden Respekt der deutschen Militärs gegenüber der Kunst bagatellisierte Hauptmann die Kulturverluste im Vergleich zu den Menschenverlusten, zu denen er sich in patriotischem Pathos bekannte: ‘Diesen Leib, den halt ich hin / Flintenkugeln und Granaten / Eh ich nicht durchlöchert bin, / kann der Feldzug nicht geraten’. Zweiter Weltkrieg Die umfangreichsten Kulturschäden überhaupt hat der Zweite Weltkrieg verursacht. Nach der Bombardierung von Warschau und Rotterdam durch Görings Luftwaffe begannen die britischen Nachtangriffe auf Berlin am 25. August 1940. Darauf zerstörte Hitler am 14. November Coventry; nicht nur die Flugzeugmotorenwerke, sondern auch die Innenstadt. Nach dem sechsten Bombardement Berlins sodann beschloss Hitler, London zu ‘coventrieren’. Trotz erheblichen Überraschungserfolgen mit der V1-Waffe und beträchtlichen Kulturschäden in London, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich und York fehlten ihm bald die Raketen und Flugzeuge, um diesen Terror wirksam fortführen zu können. Im Gegenzug befahl Winston Churchill das undiscriminate bombing, den ‘unterschiedslosen Luftkrieg’. Er begann im Mai 1940, erreichte in der Operation Gomorrha, dem sieben Tage währenden Dreitausend Bomber-Angriff auf Hamburg im Juli 1943 seinen ersten Höhepunkt und seinen letzten in der von Eisenhower angeordneten Vernichtung der Barockstadt Dresden, die mit Flüchtlingen aus Schlesien überfüllt war, am 13. Februar 1945. Dresden brannte, gemäß Churchill ‘simply for increasing terror’. Die Kulturverluste spielen in der Diskussion um den Bombenkrieg eine untergeordnete Rolle. Als es zu Kriegsbeginn um die Berechtigung ging, Berlin zu bombardieren, äußerte Eleanor Roosevelt, die Gattin des Präsidenten, in Berlin gebe es wenig, dessen Destruktion man bedauern müsste. Als schon fast nichts mehr zu zerstören war, wurden unter anderen noch die nur als Kulturdenkmäler

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bemerkenswerten Innenstädte von Würzburg. Hildesheim, Pforzheim, Halberstadt, Merseburg und Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Schutt und Asche gelegt. Die Kriegsopferstatistik verzeichnet in Deutschland insgesamt über tausend zerstörte Baudenkmäler, von denen die Hälfte völlig vernichtet wurde. Das Ziel des seit März 1942 durchgeführten carpet bombing der achtzig wesentlichen deutschen Altstädte war, wie Churchill schreibt, nicht primär die Vernichtung von Kulturgütern, sondern ganz einfach eine pauschale Schadensmaximierung durch hochefziente F1ächenbrände. Die Städte wurden nach ihrer Brandanfälligkeit eingestuft, und dies spielte eine Rolle bei der Auswahl der Ziele. In diesem obliterating bombing, bei denen auch Hunderttausende von Frauen und Kindern den Flammentod fanden, sollte, so wurde argumentiert, der moralische Widerstand der Truppe im Felde gebrochen werden. Es gibt indessen keine Anzeichen dafür, dass dieser Zweck erreicht wurde. Die Folge war eher Erbitterung. Anders als die übrigen Luftmarschälle ist der Stratege der ‘BaedekerBombardierungen’ (die englischen Quellen sprechen von Baedeker-Raids), Arthur Harris, erst nachträglich, bei der Krönung Elisabeths 1953, geadelt worden. Man warf ihm nicht etwa die sinnlose Zerstörung alteuropäischer Städte vor, sondern beschuldigte ihn, den man butcher nannte, Bomberpiloten geopfert zu haben, ohne dass der Sieg spürbar beschleunigt worden wäre. Er selbst hat in seinen sehr offenherzigen Memoiren Bomber Offensive (1947) die Verantwortung für das ‘grausame Zerstörungswerk, das selbst einem Attila Schande bereitet hätte’, abgelehnt und dem Kriegskabinett zugeschoben. Dass er nicht immer so dachte, beweist das von ihm angelegte Blue Book of Bombing, ein bibliophiles Unikat. Es handelt sich um ein großes, in blaues Leder eingebundenes Photoalbum. Das Deckblatt zeigt das zerstörte Coventry, das innere paarweise angeordnete Aufnahmen deutscher Städte vor und nach dem Besuch der Royal Air Force mit einer exakten Zerstörungsstatistik. Es wurde Stalin vorgelegt, der aber bestritt den militärischen Wert der Aktionen. Ein heikler Punkt waren die anglo-amerikanischen Luftangriffe auf nichtdeutsche Städte. Im März 1945 wurden in Italien 621 Orte bombardiert. Die Luftangriffe auf Genua, wo schon 1941 siebzig Kirchen ruiniert wurden, auf Turin und Mailand wertete Harris dennoch als moralischen Erfolg. Bedauert wurden die versehentlichen, auf Navigationsfehlern beruhenden Bombardierungen von Stockholm und Schaffhausen, vor allem aber die französischer und italienischer Städte,

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in denen weder Kriegsindustrie noch deutsche Besatzung lag, so die Zerstörung von Caen, dem ‘normannischen Athen’, und Rouen, dem Zentrum der Spätgotik; nicht zu vergessen die Bombardierungen von Rom, die 1943 San Lorenzo fuori le Mura trafen, und die militärisch unsinnige Zerstörung des ältesten Klosters Europas, Montecassino am 15. Februar 1944. Der britische General Harold Alexander wußte, dass der im deutschen Machtbereich liegende Berg Benedikts von Nursia nicht besetzt war; trotzdem läßt er, um seine Luftüberlegenheit zu beweisen, Klausur und Kirche zertrümmern. Der Bombenkrieg über Japan war schrecklich durch die dort vorherrschende Holzbauweise. Der große Pazist Albert Einstein hatte schon vor dem Beginn des Letzten Weltkriegs, am 2. August 1939, dem Präsidenten Roosevelt die Konstruktion einer Atombombe empfohlen, um Deutschland zu treffen, doch kam dem Dönitz mit der Kapitulation am 8. Mai zuvor. Was hätte man auch noch kaputt machen können? Die Frage stellte sich auch in Japan. Als die Atombomben am 6./9. August auf Hiroshima und Nagasaki elen, war die Hälfte der japanischen Städte bereits eingeäschert, einschließlich Tokyo, all das in den letzten fünf Monaten des Krieges. Dass der Pilot des Atombombers Enola Gay ins Kloster gegangen sei, ist eine fromme Legende, moralische Romantik. Als er 1946 interviewt wurde, bedauerte er, dass er nur zwei der geplanten fünf Bomben abwerfen durfte. Er sah sich als Kriegsheld. Harris behauptete 1947, der Feuer-Taifun, den seine boys bei der Operation Gomorrha in Hamburg erzeugt hatten, sei more cataclysmic gewesen als die weißen Wolken über Hiroshima und Nagasaki. Die Harris von General Fuller vorgeworfene Vernichtung von Kirchen, Museen, Bibliotheken und Denkmälern glitt ab, Harris verteidigte selbst die in England umstrittene Zerstörung von Dresden. In grausamer Ironie vollstreckte Harris in Monaten, was Hitler in Jahrtausenden erwartet hatte: Deutschland in Ruinen, wie es Albert Speers ‘Theorie vom Ruinenwert’ der Architektur voraussah, ja einplante. Auch in zerstörtem Zustand sollten seine Bauten noch heroische Gefühle wecken, so wie die dorischen Tempel von Paestum und das Colosseum in Rom. Gegenüber den Kulturschäden in Deutschland verschloß Hitler die Augen. Seine Paladine gaben zynische Bemerkungen von sich. Göring meinte, schließlich hätten die alten Germanen ja auch in Erdhöhlen gehaust; und Goebbels erklärte, die Berliner hätten sich so an die Luftangriffe gewöhnt, dass ihnen an einem Tage ohne Bomben direkt etwas fehle—so die letzte frivole Bemerkung in seinem Tagebuch. Der Stil der Kriegsführung unterschied sich im Osten von dem

24. vandalism as secular iconoclasm

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Westen. In Russland sprengte die Heeresgruppe Nord vor dem Rückzug die Barockschlösser um Sankt Petersburg, man gönnte sie den Sowjets nicht. In Warschau wurde beim Kampf um das Ghetto zugleich die historische Altstadt achgelegt. Anders in Frankreich: Als Hitler beim Anrücken der Amerikaner befahl, Paris, die auch in seinen Augen schönste Stadt Europas, in ein Trümmerfeld zu verwandeln, verständigten sich die Generale Dietrich von Choltitz und Hans Speidel am 23. August 1944 telefonisch, auf eigene Gefahr diesen Nerobefehl zu ignorieren. Es ist bei den kriegsbedingten Kulturschäden oft schwer auszumachen, wieweit sie vom Täter als militärisch unumgänglich mit echtem Bedauern oder mit kalter Indolenz in Kauf genommen wurden oder gar einer gezielten Zerstörungsabsicht entsprachen. Dasselbe gilt für die Schonung von Kulturgut im Kampf. Als die in Italien von Süden vordringenden Alliierten Anfang Juni 1944 bereits auf den Albanerbergen standen, erkannte Kesselring, dass Rom nicht zu halten war. Er befahl den Rückzug und gab am 4. Juni bekannt, der Führer habe die Zurücknahme der deutschen Truppen nordwestlich von Rom befohlen, um die Gefahr zu vermeiden, dass das ‘älteste Kulturzentrum der Welt in direkte Kampfhandlungen’ einbezogen würde. Dass der Führerbefehl authentisch ist, darf man bezweifeln. Goebbels jedenfalls bestritt dies. Er notierte am selben Tage, jeder Quadratmeter werde verteidigt, koste es, was es wolle. Eine Zerstörung Roms würde in jedem Falle den Deutschen angelastet, was ihm gleichgültig sei. Am Tage darauf nannte Goebbels die Rücksicht auf Roms Kunstschätze eine „etwas lendenlahm klingende Sprachregelung’. Er maß ihr einen gewissen Propagandawert bei angesichts des großen Prestigeverlusts, der mit der mi1itärischen Preisgabe Roms verbunden war. Selbst zeigt er keine Skrupel gegenüber einem neuen Kampf um Rom, und dass manche deutsche Ofziere hier etwas sensibler waren, kam ihm nicht in den Sinn. Befreiungsvandalismus Die Beurteilung der Kriegsschäden hat sich nach 1945 verändert. Während des Krieges waren die dem Feinde zugefügten Schläge auf beiden Seiten ein Grund des Stolzes. Was man selbst erreicht haben wollte, wurde übertrieben; was man erlitten hatte, verkleinert. Das kehrte sich dann um. Harris hatte für das small scale bombing Görings nur Verachtung übrig. Die Zerstörungen durch die Luftwaffe waren in seinen Augen bloße Nadelstiche, in Coventry brannten hundert acres, in Hamburg über sechstausend. Churchill berichtete im Juni 1943, die

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Zerstörungen der Deutschen um das 35fache übertroffen zu haben. Mag das übertrieben sein, so war die Bilanz gegen Kriegsende gewiss hundert zu eins. Dieses Ungleichgewicht mag ein Grund dafür sein, dass Verbrechen gegen die Kultur in den Nürnberger Prozessen 1946/47 nicht zur Sprache kamen. Möglich ware dies durchaus gewesen. Die Haager Friedensordnung von 1907 untersagt den Beschuss von religiösen, wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Einrichtungen, und nur diabolische Rabulistik kann behaupten, an die damals für die Artillerie erlassenen Beschränkungen sei die Luftwaffe nicht gebunden. Die Haager Luftkriegsregeln von 1922 allerdings wurden nicht ratiziert, da Paris erklärte, die Bestimmungen von 1907 reichten aus. In einer Erklärung der britischen und französischen Regierung vom 2. September 1939, der sich auch Berlin anschloss, sollten nur ‘im strengsten Sinne militärische Ziele bombardiert’ werden. Angesichts der Wirkungslosigkeit dieser Manifestationen kann man fast verstehen, dass sich die Vereinigten Staaten 1954 ausdrücklich vorbehalten haben, im Kriegsfalle alles zu bombardieren. Nach dem was in Bagdad, Belgrad und Bosnien geschehen ist, besteht wohl keine Aussicht auf einen Konsens über Kulturschutz im Kriege. Überblicken wir die militärisch bedingten Denkmalsverluste, so überrascht, dass sie in der Öffentlichkeit vergleichsweise leicht verschmerzt werden. Bomber-Harris erhielt in London eine Statue auf hohem Potest. Sie steht vor der Kirche der Royal Air Force Saint Clement Danes am Strand und wurde am 31. Mai 1992 eingeweiht, am 50. Jahrestag der Tausendbomber-Nacht von Köln. Unter Gesang und Gebet haben Königinmutter und Margret Thatcher das Denkmal für den Denkmalzerstörer enthüllt, während eine Staffel der historischen Bomber Flying Fortresses über der Stadt kreiste. Anders in den Staaten. Als der Direktor des National Air and Space Museums der Smithsonian Institution in Washington Martin Harwit den 50. Jahrestag von Hiroshima aus amerikanischer und aus japanischer Sicht dokumentieren wollte, protestierten die Veteranen. Der Kongress gab ihnen Recht, und Harwit musste seinen Posten räumen. Kriegsverbrechen begehen eben nur die Verlierer. Die geplante Sondermarke mit dem Atompilz kam allerdings nicht in Umlauf, man war sich der Glaubwürdigkeit der Atombombe als Symbol für Frieden, Freiheit und technischen Fortschritt nicht mehr sicher. Truman freilich hatte den Tod von Hiroshima zum ‘grössten Ereignis der Geschichte’ erklärt.

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Die von den Alliierten in Italien und Frankreich angerichteten Zerstörungen werden dort als Preis für die Befreiung von den Deutschen, als vandalisme libérateur verstanden. Wir Deutsche verkraften die eigenen Verluste als Strafe für das Abgleiten in den Nationalsozialismus. Neben der Bestialität der Judenvernichtung scheint für uns alles andere Elend der Kriegszeit zu verschwinden, einschließlich der 14 Millionen Ostüchtlinge. Das Schicksal der Kultur wird zweitrangig, es spielt auch in dem umfassenden Buch von Cora Stephan, Das Handwerk des Krieges (1998) keine Rolle. In der Kriegsliteratur wird es kaum thematisiert. Im allgemeinen Bewusstsein haben Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, der Kampf gegen Hunger und Not, sowie die Zerstörung der natürlichen Umwelt einen deutlich höheren Stellenwert als die Bedrohung und Vernichtung von Kulturgut. Die Politik setzt andere Prioritäten. Wir spüren es täglich in der Finanzpolitik: Wenn gespart werden muss, wird gewöhnlich zuerst der Kulturetat gekürzt. Spricht daraus ein bedauerlicher Materialismus? Oder ein begrüssenswerter Optimismus? Etwa die Erkenntnis, dass die Kultur immer wieder aufgeblüht ist, und die Einsicht, dass ein begrenztes Abräumen wünschbar ist, um den Wert des Verbliebenen zu steigern, ja geradezu notwendig erscheint, um Platz für Neues zu schaffen? Schlussbetrachtung Angesichts der Ubiquität im Kulturverschleiss müssen wir uns fragen, wie wir damit fertig werden. Wer ihn nicht bagatellisieren kann, wie Hegel, dem das selbstgefällige Trübsal, ja Kritik am Weltgeist war, noch begrüßen will, wie Nietzsche, der darin Willen zur Macht erkannte, wird zu den Weltgeschichtlichen Betrachtungen von Jacob Burckhardt greifen. In seinen Ausführungen über Glück und Unglück in der Weltgeschichte entwickelt er das Kompensationsgesetz der Geschichte: ‘Bei allen Zerstörungen lässt sich aber immer eins behaupten: weil uns die Ökonomie der Weltgeschichte im großen Dunkel bleibt, wissen wir nie, was geschehen sein würde, wenn etwas, und sei es das Schrecklichste, unterblieben wäre. Statt einer weltgeschichtlichen Woge, die wir kennen, wäre wohl eine andere gekommen. die wir nicht kennen, statt eines schlimmen Unterdrückers vielleicht ein noch böserer’. Burckhardt denkt an das Herrenwort aus Jesaja ‘Eure Wege sind nicht meine Wege’ (55. 8). Burckhardts Schlüsselsatz lautet: Das ‘Böse auf Erden’ ist ein ‘Teil der großen weltgeschichtlichen Ökonomie’, die uns Menschen

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grundsätzlich verschlossen bleibt. Es äußert sich in der Macht, die für Burckhardt ‘an sich böse’ ist, aber ‘vorgebildet in demjenigen Kampf ums Dasein, welcher die ganze Natur erfüllt’. In diesen Gedanken vom Kampf als Grundgesetz des Daseins greift Burckhardt über Darwin auf Heraklit zurück. Dessen Satz vom polemos patèr pantoon übersetzte Burcklardt. ‘Der Gegensatz ist die Ursache alles Werdens’. Seine in unseren Ohren bedenklichen, aber doch bedenkenswerten Überlegungen zum Nutzen des Krieges verweisen auf Ernst von Lasaulx, der als einer der ersten 1856 in seinem Neuen Versuch einer alten auf die Wahrheit der Tatsache gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte unseren Satz geschichtsphilosophisch ausgeleuchtet hat. Er sah im Krieg ein ‘Weltgesetz’, gleichermaßen wirksam unter Panzen, Tieren und Menschen. Lasaulx berief sich auf göttliche Zerstörer, auf den jüdischen Jahwe und den indischen Shiwa und fand im Kampf die Ursache für ‘alles, was groß und gut ist im Menschen’ (Lasaulx, 1925, 43). Lasaulx und Burckhardt haben zwischen Krieg und Kampf nicht unterschieden. Doch seit 1918 ist das nicht mehr dasselbe. Was für den Krieg zu bestreiten ist, wäre für den Kampf beizubehalten, will sagen: Kultur muss Gegensätze aushalten, muss sich gegen Widerstände durchsetzen und erfordert die Bereitschaft, sie zu verteidigen. Das gilt für alle Humaniora, wie für Kultur, so für Recht und Gesetz. Dazu nochmals Heraklit: ‘Kämpfen soll das Volk für den nomos, wie für die Mauer’ (B 44). LITERATURE Burckhardt, J., Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Berlin-Stuttgart, 1905 (Basel-Stuttgart, 1978). Demandt, A., Vandalismus. Gewalt gegen Kultur, Berlin, 1997. Diels, H., Kranz, W. (ed.), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Berlin, 1934–19375, 1–111. Harris, A.T., Bomber-Offensive, London, 1947. Lasaulx, E. von, Verschüttetes deutsches Schrifttum. Ausgewählte Werke 1841–1860, Stuttgart, 1925.

INDEX Aaron (highpriest), 150, 152 Abaelardus, 268 Abba Samoqa, 168 Abbahu, rabbi, 173–174 Abraham, patriarch, 56, 61, 67, 104, 303, 357–360 Abrams, D., 163 Acta Iohannis, 220 Acton, J., 398, 401 Adam, 35, 61, 104, 109, 157, 163, 173, 174, 237, 356 Adam of St. Victor, 364 Adler, J., 448 Adriaan de Waal van Vronesteijn, 316 A-E-people, 5–7 Aelred of Rievaulx, Sermones, 266 Agaësse, P., 195 Aggiornamento, 465, 466 Agrippa, 477 Akiva, rabbi, 17, 98, 99, 100–105 Alan of Lille, 59, 266, 268, 269 De de catholica contra hereticos, 269 Alaric, king, 477 Albigensians, 112, 249 Alcuinus (Turonensis), 20, 212, 214, 215 Vita Willibrordi, 20, 201, 211–215 Epistulae, 215 Allegory (allegorical method), 24, 37, 82, 89, 91, 116, 118, 150, 156, 158, 160, 162, 183, 184, 238, 267, 346, 348, 351, 394, 402 Alexander of Ashby (Essebiensis), 264–265 De articioso modo predicandi, 264 Sermones, 265 Alexander the Great, 476 Alexander, H., 484 Alfonse ‘el Tostado’, 359, 365, 365, 373 Alibert, D., 220 Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung, 428 Alphen aan den Rijn, 23, 331–351 Alphen Pig War, 23, 24, 341–351 Alverny, M.-Th. d’, 266 Alzog, J.B., 394 Amalarius of Metz, 88 Liber ofcialis, 89

Ama Traxsin, 148, 149 Ambrose, 19, 110, 160, 179, 183, 184, 197 Amiel of Perles, 274 Amon-Re, 475 Amsterdam, 314, 320, 324, 340, 442 Heilige Stede, 321 Anabaptists, 117 Analogical imagination, 56–60 Anderson, B., 419 Andrada de Payva, D., 369 Angels, 50, 53, 58, 99, 153, 157, 169–174, 176, 205, 251, 252, 270, 319, 358, 359, 440 Angenendt, A., 90, 91, 109, 110, 387 Animism, 465 Anonymous Cistercian sermon (Dijon), 266–268 Anthony of Padua, 285 Anthropomorphic Trinity, 24, 359–360, 373 Anthropomorphism, 19, 157–168, 184–196, 247f, 128, 181–200, 354 Antichrist, 111, 112, 116 Antoninus Florentinus, 361–362 Aphaeresis, 190 Apocryphal apostle traditions, 18, 20, 218f Apocryphal narratives, 217–232 Apophatic theology, 19, 58, 190, 197 Apotheosis of Queen Luise of Prussia, 387, 392, 401 Arabs, 479 Arbués, Pedro de, 25, 388, 395, 397–401, 402, 403 beatication, 397 canonization, 400 Arianism, 110, 188, 263 Aristo ( journal), 463 Aristotle, 38, 58 Ark of the Covenant, 14, 145, 146, 148, 151–155, 303, 307 Arminian controversies, 348 Armstrong, A.H., 197 Arnaud de Brescia, 268 Arnauld, Agnes, 377–378 Arnauld, Angelique, 378 Arnaut Sicre, 247, 251, 253 Arnim, A. von, 391

490

index

Arp, H., 452, 456 Arphaxat (magician), 227, 231 Art-sacré movement, 459–460, 464 Aschheim, S.E., 425 Asselbergs, W., see Duinkerken, A. van Asselt, W. van, 1, 23, 299 Assisi, 279, 282 Portiuncula or St. Mary of the Angels, 279, 292 San Damiano, 283 San Francesco, 22, 279, 288–291 Sacro Convent, 289 Assisi Compilation, 287 Assmann, A., 392 Assmann, J., 25, 392 Astaroth, god, 220f, 231 Aston, M., 304 Asymmetry, 133 of interhuman relationships, 134, 135, 137, 139 Atatürk, K., 477 Atelier Dada, 455 Athanase d’Alexandrie (Athanasius Alexandrinus), 211 Vie d’Antoine (Vita Antonii), 211f Auf der Maur, H., 87 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 399 Augustine, 15, 18, 19, 38, 43–47, 66, 157–167, 179–200, 237, 240, 265, 304, 306, 355– 358, 376–377 Confessiones, 19, 179, 180, 181, 183, 188–191, 198, 240 De ciuitate Dei, 19, 179, 180, 186, 238 De doctrina christiana, 15, 192 De ordine, 180 De de et symbolo, 192 De Genesi ad litteram, 184 De Genesi aduersus Manicheos, 182, 183, 184 De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus Manicheorum, 184 De sermone Domini in monte, 238 De utilitate credendi, 182 Epistulae, 180, 189 De Trinitate, 19, 188, 191–195, 198 In epistolam Iohannis ad Parthos, 195–196 In Iohannis euangelium tractatus CXXIV, 191 Praeceptum, 185 Retractationum libri II, 183 Sermo 23, 19, 185–186 Sermo 53, 19, 186–187, 195 Sermo 111, 185 Sermo 277, 19, 187–188 Augustus, emperor, 477 Aurell, M., 249

Ausdruckskultur, 415 Austin, J., 84 Avant-Garde, 14, 25–27, 445–467 Avenarius, F., 411, 414 Avery-Peck, A.J., 52 Avishur, Y., 165 Ayala, J.I. de, 371 Ayala, M.P., 366 Baal Shem Tov, 102 Baar, M. de, 389 Ball, H., 446, 451–456 Bar Kochba Bez’alel, 145–151, 154 Barber, M., 120 Bartelink, G.J.M., 221 Barthélemy Aurillac, 274 Bartholomew, apostle, 220f Baschet, J., 120 Bataille, G., 64 Bauer, D.R., 115 Bauhaus, 448 Bavel, T.J., van, 194, 195 Bayer, O., 37 Beatic vision, see visio beatica Beckmann, M., 447 Befreiungsvandalismus, 485 Belisar, 474, 478 Bell, C., 77, 81, 84 Bellarmino, R., 362 Ben Sirah, 150 Benedict of Nursia, 201, 207–210, 212, 214, 215 Benedict XIV, pope, 24, 353, 369, 372–373, 380, 382, 399 Benedictional (Canterbury), 224 Benjamin, W., 14 Berend, N., 110 Bergen op Zoom Gertrudiskerk, 321 Berghes, M. de, 374 Bergh-Hoogterp, L.E. van den, 324 Bergsma, W., 344 Bériou, N., 272 Berlin Wall, 50 Berliner Christusausstellung (1896), 408, 415f Berliner Fremdenblatt, 416 Bernabo, M., 152 Bernard of Clairvaux, 61, 248, 264, 268, 303 Apologia ad Guillelmum Abatem, 286–288 Epistola 457, 117, 118 Sermones in die Paschae, 265 Epistulae, 268

index Liber ad milites templi, 268 Bernard de Caux, 251 Bernard Clergue, 274 Bernard Gui, 252, 263, 272 Le livre des sentences, 272, 274 Bernard Macip of Lugan, 274 Bernard, S., 59 Bernulphus, bishop, 320, 326 Bertrand, C., 460, 462 Besançon, A., 466 Bessent, E., 242 Beyme, K. van, 446 Bèze, Th. de, 366–367 Biandrata, G., 363 Bible Moralisée, 21, 36, 42, 235–245 Biblia pauperum, 52, 66, 71 Bibliolatry, 37, 39, 43–44 Bierck, Th., 416–428 Biggelaar, R. van, 462 Bijl, M. van der, 345 Bijlert, Jan van, 375 Bilder sind nicht verboten (exhibition), 465 Bildersturm, 479 Bildungsbürger, 403, 409f Bildungsreligion, 425 Bird, J., 270 Bismarck, O. von, 481 Bittlinger, E., 413 Black Cross, 449–450 Blanche of Rodes, 273 Blaue Reiter Almanach, 448, 449 Blavatsky, M., 449 Blokker, J., 315 Blom, I., 394 Bloy, L., 455 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 393 Blume, C., 226 Böckling, A., 411 Bodt, S.F.M. de, 324 Boelema, I., 328 Boersema, B.R.C.A., 463 Bœspug, F., 7, 359, 362–364, 373, 383 Boetticher, F. von, 400 Bogomils, 249, 268, 273 Bois, F. du, 362 Bonaventure, 284 Boniface, bishop, 110, 389 Bonnet, M., 221 Bonus, A., 411, 424, 428 Bonus-Jeep, B., 417, 418, 420, 421–423, 427, 428 Borgia, E., 76 Borgmann, K., 408 Borkenhagen, H., 425

491

Bornert, R., 273 Borst, A., 248 Bossuet, J.-B., 379 Bouman, A., 333–342, 347 Bouvy, D.P.R.A., 325 Boyarin, D., 158 Bragança, 291 Brand, B., 412 Brandt, G., 314 Branham, J.R., 147 Braun, K., 369, 369 brazen serpent, 303 Brenon. A., 21, 247, 248, 250, 257, 268 Broderick, H.R., 153 Broich, U., 64 Brom, G., 450 Brossard-Dandré, M., 220 Brown, P., 188, 220 Brown, R.E., 169 Bruch, R. vom, 414, 415 Brückner, W., 410 Brugmans, H., 315 Brühl, G., 448 Bruhn, M., 408 Bruin, R.E de, 318 Brundage, J., 263, 271 Bruns, K., 415 Brütt, F., 420, 421 Bruyn, G. de, 391, 393 Buchler, J., 81 Buddhism, 3, 12, 60 Buhmann, H.K.E., 428 Bunke, E., 427 Burckhardt, J., 480, 487, 488 Burggraf, J., 420 Burke, P., 408 Burks, A., 81 Burney, C.F., 170 Buruma, I., 9 Butin, Ph., 306 Byzantine Art, 150–155 Byzantine iconoclasts, 5, 16, 131, 305 Byzantine Orthodox Church, 455 Byzantine Rites, 395 Byzantine traditions, 16 Byzantium, 479, 480 Cabaret Voltaire, 452 Cabasilas, N., 76 Cabrol, F., 223 Calendar of saints, liturgical, 403 Calvin, J., 22, 42, 60, 61, 300, 304–308, 362, 365, 368, 457 Institutes, 306, 307

492

index

Calvinism (Calvinists), 22, 37, 61, 75, 299, 314, 317, 318, 366, 374, 375, 436, 479 Cameron, E., 61 Campenhausen, H. von, 304 Canon, 37 Canonization, 388, 398, 401, 403 Capizucchi, R.C., 369–371, 373 Capuchins, 291 Carabine, D., 180 Caritas, 195–196 Carpet bombing, 483 Carthusians, 285, 293 Cathar Bible of Arles, 255, 257 Cathar Bible of Lyon, 21, 254–259 Cathar imagery, 247 Cathar occitan ritual of Dublin, 251 Cathar religious art, 253 Cathar rituals, 249 Catharin, A., 368–369 Cathars, 21, 60, 117, 247–261, 268, 269, 273, 276 Cathars, 60 Catholic Church (ultramontane), 26 Catholic Church, 23, 24, 26, 41, 53, 114, 281, 294, 310, 358, 362, 368, 373, 375, 377, 379, 382, 395, 398, 403, 412, 445–447, 452, 555, 460, 465 Catholicism, 36, 37 Cazes, Q., 116 Celan, P., 14 Cenci, C., 285 Certeau, M. de, 401 Chadwick, O., 63 Chagall, M., 447, 460, 461, 464 Champaigne, J.-B. de, 378 Champaigne, Ph. de, 377–378 Charles V, emperor, 316 Charles, emperor, 213, 214 Chartier, R., 408 Chauvet, J.-M., 49, 66, 70 Chazan, R., 265, 268 Chemnitz, M., 369 Chenu, M.-D., 241 Cherubim, 18, 144 on the Ark of the Covenant, 14, 18, 144, 145, 147–154 Chiliastic expectations, 12 Choltitz, D. von, 485 Christ, passim Christ, Poor, 280–283, 290, 292 Christe, Y., 236 Christian Topography, 150

Christian universality (concept), 109–110 Christology, 138, 426 As idolatry, 138 Constitutions, general of the Carthusians (1127), 285 of the Cistercians, 286 of the Dominicans (1228), 285 of the Friars Minor, 20 before 1260, 285 Narbonne (1260), 284, 288, 290–291, 293 Assisi (1279), 285 Paris (1292), 285 Christianitas (concept), 17, 110–113, 118 Christliche Freiheit. Blätter für eine evangelische Volkskirche 25 (1909), 694–696 Christliches Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule und Haus, 409f Chupungco, A., 87 Churchill, W., 482, 485 Cistercians, 60, 266, 268, 281, 286, 291, 293 Clark, E.A., 43 Clark, F., 207 Clement of Alexandria, 59 Clement, pope, 323 Cluny, 286 Cocceians, 23, 333–334, 340, 345 Code of Canon Law (1917), 458 Coebergh, C., 89 Cohen, M.S., 166–168 coins, coinage Jewish, 145–150, 154 Roman, 146 Colish, M., 240 Collection Pseudo-Abdias, 219, 220, 221, 225, 229 Cologne, cross of Gero, 292 Communion of the Saints, 54 Communism, 389 Compassio Patris, 370–371, 375 Comte-Sponville, A., 451 Conquistadores, 479 Constantinople, 478 Conversos, 397 Cook, W.R., 283, 293 Coomans, Th., 291 Corbusier, le, 460 Cordez, Ph., 241 Cordovani, M., 456f Corinth, L., 450 Cortona, San Francesco, 291 Cosmas Indicopleustes (Constantine of Antioch), 150

index Cosmas, priest, 249, 273 Council of Cambrai, 374, 376 Council of Chalcedon, 54 Council of Frankfurt, 53 Council of Nicea II, 52, 54, 55, 357 Council of Pistoia, 24, 381–382 Council of Trent, 23, 24, 353, 367ff, 373, 379, 457 Council of Utrecht, 374 Counter Reformation, 355, 358 Courbet, G., 27 Courcelle, P., 188 Couroyer, B., 166 Courtois, R., 452, 455 Couturier, M.A., 445, 458, 460 Cowdrey, H.E.J., 111, 113 Cramer, P., 244 Creation of Eve, 356–357 Creation, 15, 34–35, 40, 182–184, 197, 238, 239, 241, 245, 247, 251, 253, 258 Creyghton, J., 463 Crucesignati, 271 Crucied, images of, 284, 292–29 Crusades, 21, 111, 112, 117, 263, 270, 271 Cultural memory, 392 Cyril of Alexandria, 354 d’Espence, C., 366–367 Dadaism, 446, 448, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456 Daley, B., 116 Dam, R., van 203, 204 Damião a Góis, 360 Dan, Y., 157 Darnton, R., 114 Darwin, C., 126, 488 Dávid, F., 363 David, king, 210, 215, 327, 371 Davril, A., 89 Day of Atonement, see Yom Kippur De Gaifer, B., 228 De Gemeenschap ( journal), 459 De invocatione (decree), 24 De Linie ( journal), 463 De Nieuwe Gemeenschap, 463 Decalogue, see Ten Commandments Den Bosch Sint-Jan Cathedral, 322 Onze Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap, 322 Swan Brothers, 323 Deconstruction, 15, 50, 64 Defoer, H.L.M., 323, 326

493

Dehumanization (process), 115–118 Deictical meaning, 65, 67–68 Deleuze, G., 244 Demandt, A., 27, 109, 393, 401, 403, 471–472 Demetrios Poliorketes, 476 Demons, 20, 50, 116, 207, 217–220, 222, 223, 227, 230, 231, 232 Demons (medieval manifestations), 218–219 Demons (representatives non-Christian religion), 217f Denzinger, H., 53 Déom, L., 242 Der Kunstwart, 411, 415 Der Sturm (magazine), 447, 448 Der Volkserzieher. Blatt für Familie, Schule und öffentliches Leben, 415f Derbes, A., 293 Derrida, J., 33, 34, 69, 197 Desbonnets, Th., 281 Deus artifex, 42, 241 Deutsche Rundschau, 391 Devil, 7, 9, 50, 58, 111–116, 119, 187, 207, 213, 218, 219, 231, 251–253, 259, 361, 362, 438, 440, 455 Devotio Moderna, 287 Die Christliche Freiheit ( journal), 425 Die Christliche Welt ( journal), 410, 415, 418, 421, 427 Die Kunst für alle, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 427 Die Nazarener, 432 Die Reformation ( journal), 427 Diels H., 473 Diem, A., 219, 220 Dijkstra, J., 321 Dilthey, W., 66 Dinkelaar, H., 334 Dinzelbacher, P., 111, 114, 119 Diogenes Laërtios, 473 Dionysios II (tyrant), 476 Dionysius Areopagita, 57 De divinis nominibus, 57 Dix, O., 447, 448 Docetism, 251, 252, 267, 275 Dodd, C.H., 177 Döllinger, I. von, 398, 399, 401, 403 Dominicans, 116, 281, 285–286, 293, 316 Donatello, 361 Donatists, 188 Donkey-case, the, 436–437 Doorman, M., 447

494

index

Dorival, B., 377–378, 383 Dostoyevski, F., 440 Dowey, E., 306 Draisma S., 71 Dresner, S.H., 96 Dressendörfer, P., 116 Driscoll, M., 91 Droste, Th., 116 Drutt, M., 14, 450 dualism, 19, 180, 184, 198, 249–251, 301, 303 Platonic: body vs. spirit, 306 Pauline: spirit vs. Flesh, 306 Duby, G., 110 Duffy, E., 300 Duhamel, J.-B, 358 Duinkerken, A. van. 463, 464 Dundes A., 238 Dupeux, C., 60 Dura Europos, synagogue of, 149–150, 154 Durand de Saint-Pourçin, 365 Durant, J.-F., 242 Dutch beeldenstorm, 1566, 36 Dutch Golden Age, 350 Dutch Reformed Church, 336 Dutch Republic, 22, 24, 332–350 Duvernoy, J., 247, 248, 250, 251, 253, 272, 274 Duyndam, J., 126 Dvir, see Holy of Holies Dyrness, W.A., 307, 308 Ebeling, G., 62 Eccleston The Coming of the Friars Minor to England, 284, 294 Echnaton, 475 Eckbert of Schönau, 268 Eckhart, 57 Egypt (pharaonic), 475 Einstein, A., 484 Eire, C.M.N., 299–301, 305, 306, 308 Elgin, Lord, 481 Elias of Cortona, 289–291 Elijah, 67, 203, 207, 212, 213, 215, 362 Elisha, 203, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215 Engelman, J., 463 Enlightenment, 39, 324, 350 Radical E., 349 Post.-E., 409 Enoch, 101 Ensor, J., 461 Epiphany of God in Nature and History, 37, 49–52

liturgy, 327 Epistemological revolt, 15 Erfurt Church of the Holy Spirit, 283 Ernst, W., 425 Es, J. van, 334 Espen, Z-B. van, 356, 358 Esser, K., 281 Eucharist, 21, 36, 39, 67, 70, 86, 87, 221, 223f, 236, 242, 244, 307, 422 Euripides, 476 Evangelischer Bund (Protestant Federation), 395 Even-Chen, A., 16, 17, 95, 96, 104 Evers, G.A., 319 Evervin of Steinfeld Epistola CDLXXII, 248 Ewals, L., 460 Exalto, J., 309, 310 Exegesis, 38, 43–45 exemplum tradition, 23 Expressionism, 450 Fabricius, J.A., 220, 225, 227, 228 Faverey, H., 26, 435, 441–444 Hinderlijke goden, 441–442 Feld, H., 281 Felder, H., 281 Ferry, L., 451 Ferziger, A., 9 Feudalismus, 475 Flavius Josephus, 120 Antiquitates, 155 Contra apionem, 120 Flood, D., 281 Flori, J., 111–113 Foerster, E., 424 Fontane, Th., 403 Förster, B., 395, 403 Fosite (god), 213 Foucault, M., 64 Fourth Lateran Council, 264, 270 Francesco d’Assisi, see Francis of Assisi Francis of Assisi, 279–296 Earlier Rule, 280, 281 Later Rule, 282, 283 Assisi Compilation, 287 Franciscans, see Friars Minor Franco-Prussian War, 402 Frank, G., 108 Frederic the Great, 480 Frederik Schenk van Toutenburg, bishop, 318, 375–376 Freeman, G.P., 22, 279, 280, 283 Freemasonry, 398

index Frei, H.W., 39 Freie Zeitung (Bern), 454 Fremdenblatt, 416, 420 French Revolution, 11, 27, 63, 387, 392, 474–475 Friars Minor, 22, 279–296, 316 Fried, M., 240 Friederike, princess of Prussia, 392, 393 Friedländer, M., 161, 164, 165 Friedman, S., 19, 157 Friedrich Wilhelm II, king of Prussia, 392 Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia 390, 391 Frijhoff, W., 25, 388–390, 402 Frishman, J., 2 Frugoni, Ch., 283 Fulk, bishop, 270 Gabriel (archangel), 258, 359 Gadamer, H.G., 66 Gallery Dada, 452 Gallwitz, H., 425 Gamber, K., 224, 230 Gaon, S., 158 Gay, E., 484 Gebhardt, E. von, 412 Gebrauchskunst, 408 Geert Grote, 287–288 Geest, P. van, 1, 7, 19, 159–161, 179, 181, 191, 265 Gehazi, 209 Geiserich, king, 474 Geoffroi d’Auxerres, 114 Geoffroy d’Ablis, 249, 255, 272, 273 German Protestantism, 407–433 Germania (symbol of Germany), 402, 477 Germanus of Constantinople, 76 Germany, Federal Republic of, 283, 394 Gero, 292 Gerok, G., 421 Gerrit van Kuilenburg, preacher, 313, 314, 315 Gesinnung, 424, 425 Gijsen, J., bishop, 27, 462 Gilson, E., 179 Ginzburg, C., 120 Giunta Pisano, 292 Glassé, C., 52 Glaubenskultur, 414 Gnadenstuhl, s. Throne of Grace Gnilka, J., 109 Goebbels, J., 484 Goedegebuure, J., 26, 435

495

Goethe, J.W. von, 387, 425 Goltz, A., 109 Gomes, P.J., 37 Goodbye Lenin (lm), 389 Göring, H., 485 gothic art, 235–246 Goths, 477 Graf, F., 424 Gratian, 118 Grau, s. Nausea Greece (classic), 476 Grégoire, H.B., bishop, 27, 471, 474 Gregory the Great, pope, 20, 39, 52, 110, 201, 206–210, 268 Dialogi, 207, 208, 209, 210 Vita Benedicti, 20, 201, 207–210, 212, 215 Gregory II, pope, 355 Gregory VII, pope, 17, 111–113, 120 Registrum Gregors VII. Epistolae selectae, 111–113 Gregory of Valencia, 361, 373 Greimas, A., 80 Gretser, J., 367 Grifn, C.W., 182 Groen, J., 463, 464 Groot, A. de, 319, 320, 321 Gross, F., 412 Grosz, G., 447, 448 Gruenwald, I., 165, 166 Grundmann, H., 61, 113, 119 Grünewald, M., 201, 450 Guardian Angel, 391 Guerric of Igny, 268 Guido da Siena, 293 Guigo I, 286 Coutumes de Chartreuse par Guigues Ier, 286 Guilhem Bélibaste, 247, 250, 251, 253, 275 Guillaume Escanier, 275 Guillaume Monge of Lugan, 274 Guillelme Garsen, 273 Gulf War, 50 Gundermann, I., 292 Günther, M., 381 Haakma Wagenaar, T., 327 Haas, A. de, 27, 445, 446, 456–458, 460–465 Hagemann, K., 394 Haggadah, 98 Haggadah, of Sarajevo, 153–155 Hagiography, 18 Halachah, 147

496 Halkin, A., 162 Hall, C., 394 Hallebeek, J., 24, 353, 457 Halsall, P., 54 Hamilton,B., 268 Hardtwig, W., 409 Harnack, A., 426 Harris, A., 483, 484 Harrison, P., 38 Hart, H., 415 Hart, J., 415 Hartmann, W., 53 Hartwich, W.D., 421 Harwit, M., 486 Hauréau, B., 266 Haverkamp, A., 115 Hecht, Chr. 369, 373, 383 Hediger, Chr., 236 Heichal, 147, 148, 154 Heidegger, M., 41 Heikalot Rabati, 100 Heikalot Zutrati, 100 Heinrich IV, emperor, 112 Helbo, rabbi, 168 Helinand of Froidmont, 364 Hellemans, B., 20, 36, 235, 243 Hellenism, 476 Hemmings, E., 452, 455 Henry of Clairvaux/Albano, De peregrinante civitate Dei, 268 Henry de Lancaster, 361 Heraklit, 473–474, 488 Heretics, 2, 9, 17, 21, 108, 111–115, 116f, 162, 219, 227, 263, 269, 276, 366 Hermans, F., 462 Hesbert, R.-J., 221, 266 Heschel, A.-J., 16, 17, 95–105, 130 Man is not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, 97, 102, 103 The Sabbath, 104 Man’s Quest for God, 105 God in Search of Man, 97, 102, 104 Heavenly Torah—as refracted through the Generations, 97–100, 103, 104 A Passion for Truth, 102 Hesse, H., 455 Hessels, J., 362, 376–378 Hessen-Darmstadt, J. von, 372, 381 Heuss, Th., 415 Hieronymus Bosch, 57 Hilger, H.P., 324 Hill, G.F., 146 Hinz, B., 388

index Hippolytos von Rom, 275, 472, 473 Hirshman, M., 172 Hiscock, N., 237 Hitler, A., 482, 484, 485 Hiyya Rabbah, rabbi, 171 Hoffmann, F., 398, 403 Hoffmann, R., 403 Holiness, 390 (see also sainthood) Hollandtsche Mercurius, 341 Holocaust, 14 Hölscher, L., 409 Holy Controversy ( jewish tradition), 16 Holy of Holies, 19, 143–154 Holy Ofce (Congregation of the doctrine of Faith), 445, 450, 456, 458, 460, 462 Hombert, P.-M., 188 Honée, E., 212 Honorius of Autun Gemma animae, 89 Hope, D., 77 Hora Siccama, J.H., 338 Horus (Egyptian god), 166 Hospitality of Abraham, 358–360 Housley, N., 112 Houtepen, A., 15, 49 Hübinger, G., 424 Hübner, K.A., 419 Huelsenbeck, R., 452 Hugenotten, 479 Hugh Eteriano, 268 Hugh of St. Victor, 59, 364 De laude caritatis, 267 Huizinga, J., 91 Hulzen, A. van, 314 Humani Generis, 458, 467 Humbert of Romans, 264, 270–272 Sermones I, II, IV, 271 De predicacione crucis, 271 Ars praedicandi, 271 Humiliati, 281 Hussein, S., 28, 50 Husserl, E., 125, 126 Hussey, J., 76 Hussites, 112 Icon, passim Iconic hermeneutics, 15, 65–69 Iconoclash, passim denition, 1–2 conceptual, 2 broather notion, 4–6 types of iconoclash, 5–6 Iconoclasm, passim

index denition, 1–2 fysical, 2 broather notion, 4–6 literal, 202–205, 207–208, 211–214 metaphorical, 205–207, 208–209, 214 Iconoclastic movements, 60 Iconoclasts, 52 Iconodouloi, 52 Icons, 69, 389, 401, 402 metaphorical icons Identity (religious), passim formation, 11 by demarcation, 402 Idolatry and art, 138 Idolatry, 4–9, 18, 37, 40–51, 69, 127, 129, 231–232, 244f, 314, and passim Idols (representatives non-Christian religion), 217f Idols, 8, 20, 49, 388–389, and passim Image controversy, early-medieval, 34 Image of ‘the others’, 8–10 Image of the poor Christ, 22 Imagined Communities, 388 Images material, 6–7 mental, 6–7, 183 Imago dei (man as), 35–36, 46 Imperial Synod of Constantinople, 55 Incarnation, 15, 20, 34–36, 39, 40, 88, 235, 242–245, 251, 266, 371 Infallibillity (Papal), 399, 401 Inimici crucis, 263, 268, 269 Innerlichkeit, 414 Innocent III, pope, 268 Innocent IV, pope, 289–290, 398 Inquisition, 21, 115, 249, 254, 372, 397, 398, 399, 402–404 Instructio ad locorum ordinaries de arte sacre, 460 Interbellum, 459 Invocavit Predigten, see Luther Iogna-Prat, D., 248 Ipséité, 64 Isaac of Stella, 268 Ishmael, rabbi, 16, 98, 99, 100, 101 Isings, J.H., 314 Islam, 8, 9, 10, 17, 21, 33, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 60, 71, 107, 109, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120, 171, 263, 397, 437, 479 Israel, J.I., 333, 345, 348, 349 Jacob, patriarch, 19, 44, 50, 62, 157, 172, 173, 174

497

Jacob’s ladder, 169 in Bereshit Rabba, 169, 175, 176 compared with the Son of Man in the Gospel of John, 170 compared with Adam, 174 Jacques Autier, 274, 275 Jacques Fournier, bishop, 247, 250f, 272 Registre, 272, 274, 275 Jacques of Vitry, bishop, 269–270, 271 James, W., 41 Janini, J., 223, 228, 230, 231 Jansenism, 377 Jatho, C., 141, 412 Jaume Autier, 249, 254 Jean Gerson, 363–364 Jeanes, G., 218 Jedin, H., 110, 366, 367 Jensen, A., 115 Jesus, see Christ Jetter, W., 79 Jews (polemics against), 397–398 Jezler, P., 60 Johannes Damascenus, 54, 55 In Defence of Icons, 52, 56 Johannes Duns Scotus, 58 John III, pope, 226 John XII, pope, 22 John Paul II, pope, 445, 465 John the Evangelist, 50, 55, 169, 171, 172, 175, 195–199, 210, 284, 292, 356 Jonathan, rabbi, 175 Jongh, E. de, 350 Jonkers, P., 69 Jonsson, H.B., 409, 410 Jordan of Giano, 283–284, 289 Jordan, A., 236 Jourdan, A., 11, 12 Jud, L., 303, 304 Judaism, passim Judas, 293 Jude, apostle, 220, 228f Julian the Apostate, 354 Jungmann J., 76, 90 Justin, 19 Kahl, H.-D., 110 Kalam (Gods spoken words), 59 Kalkar (monstrance), 324 Kalthoff, A., 425 Kampf, A., 419, 420, 421 Kandinsky, W., 13, 447, 448, 449, 452, 458 Kannengiesser, Ch., 35

498

index

Kant, I., 193 Kaplan, E.K., 96 Kaporet, 144, 147, 151, 152 Kappstein, Th., 428 Kaptein, H., 314, 322 Kardong, T.G., 219 Karlsruhe-exhibit, 3 Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von, 300 Kataphatic theology, 197 Katholiek Bouwblad, 456 Katz, E., 414 Kaufbeuren, C. von, 372, 381 Kaulbach, W. von, 400, 403 Kavanagh, A., 76 Kellendonk, 438, 465 Kellner, K., 229 Kennedy, L., 226 Kessler, H.L., 150, 151 Khoury, A.-Th., 56 Kienzle, B.M., 21, 113, 114, 219, 247, 251, 263, 265–268, 270, 271 King, Martin Luther, 96 Kirmß, P., 424 Kirschner, R., 148 Kister, M., 171 Kittel, G., 169, 176 Kittsteiner, H.D., 408 Klappmadonna, s. Opening Virgin Klauser, Th., 76, 87, 89 Klee, P., 14, 447, 449, 458, 461 Kleijntjens, J.C.J., 316 Klein, N., 16, 49 Klerikalismus, 475 Klinger, M., 411 Klotz, d., 410 Kneuleman, C., 327 Knuttel, W.P.C., 339, 342 Koch, D., 409, 411, 412 Köhn, R., 112 Kokoschka, O., 447, 458 Konrmationsscheine, 410, 411 König, Chr., 25, 406 König, K., 414, 415 Kootte, T., 314 Kopland, R., 435, 442–444 G (poem), 442–444 Kosinsky, J., 64 Kramer, J., 113 Kranz, W., 473 Krautheimer, R., 131–137, 237 Krech, V., 409 Kristallnacht, 28 Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz, 454 Krüger, K., 283, 293

Kübel, J., 426 Kubicki, J., 84 Kuhlemann, F.-M., 424 Kühner, K., 412, 413, 415, 420, 421, 423, 426 Kulturkammer, 463 Kulturzerstörung (Vandalism), 471–488 Kuncewycz, J., bishop, 25, 388, 395–397, 401, 402, 403 beatication 396 canonization, 400 Kunstfrömmigkeit, 409 Kunstseligkeit, 411 Kuyle, A., 462, 463, 464 L’Art sacré, 445 Laarse, R. van der, 459 Labrie, A., 459 Lactantius, 110 Laderman, S., 18, 143, 307 Lagarde, P. de, 425 Lambek, M., 68 Lambert, M.D., 268, 281 Lang, B., 351 Langer, S., 78–80 Langmuir, G.I., 117 Langner, B., 410 Lasch, G., 407, 414, 423 Latomus, J., 362 Latour, B., 3, 5, 6, 181, 183, 331, 348, 389 Lausaulx, E. von, 488 Le Goff, J., 114, 273 Le Roy Ladurie, E., 114, 273 Leach, E., 81 Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 426 Lebensgestaltung, 424 Leclercq, J., 264, 265, 268 Leer, S. van, 455, 456 Leeuw, G. van der, 197 Leeuwenberg, H., 326 Lemmens, G., bishop, 27, 462 Lenin, V.I., 12, 50, 446 Lentrodt, W., 415, 416 Lenz F., 65 Leo III, pope, 355 Leplat, J., 382 Leube, A., 410 Levinas, E., 17, 18, 126, 127, 131–136 Lex aeterna, 59 Ley, M., 12 Liber mozarabicus Sacramentorum, 223, 228 Liberalism, 398 Liberation war (Befreiungskriege), 391

index Libeskind, D., 14 Lieberman, S., 148 Limburg Art Collection Foundation, 462 Limburgsch Dagblad, 463 Lipsius, R.A., 221 Liturgical apostle traditions, 218f Liturgical cult (apostles), 20, 218f Liturgical traditions, 18, 218f. Liudger, bishop, 110 Loewenich, W. von, 61 Logo, 49 Logocentrism, 33, 39, 44 Logos, 33, 34, 37, 456 London, 284 Lorenz, S., 115 Lorenzer, A., 76 Louis Napoleon, king, 322 Louis VII, king, 236 Louis XIV, king, 319 Louis XVI, king, 393 Louis, prince of Prussia, 393 Louvain Augustinism, 24, 376, 380 Low Countries, 23 Lowden, J., 236 Lubac, de H., 116 Lübeck, 291 Lucifer, see devil Lugt, P. van der, 461 Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz: see Luise, queen of Prussia, 390 Luise, queen of Prussia, 25, 387, 388–394, 395, 401, 402, 403 Lukken, G., 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 91 Lundt, B., 114 Lunghi, E., 292 Luther, Martin, 22, 37, 60, 300–303, 305, 309, 370, 408 Lutheran Church, 23, 37, 299, 303, 411 Mabillon, J., 357 MacCulloch, D., 304 Machina mundi, 59–60 Macy, G., 36 Madden, F.W., 146 Madec, G., 180, 181, 183 Madigan, K., 267 Madonna, 393 Maeseneer, Y. de, 49 Magdeburg-Neustadt, 284 Magicians (representatives non-Christian religion), 20, 217, 228f Mai, E., 412, 417 Maier, Chr. T., 270 Maillard, N., 366, 367

499

Maimonides, 19, 102, 158–168 Malevic, K., 449, 450, 451, 467 Manichees, 182–186, 196 Mao Zedong, 3 Marc, F., 447, 448, 449 Marcovic, M., 472 Margalit, M., 9 Margaretha of Parma, 316, 374 Marianne (symbol of France), 402 Marie d’Oignies, 264, 269–270 Marin, L., 378, 383 Marini, P., 53 Marion, J.-L., 15, 51, 40–42, 65–67, 69 Maritain, J., 450, 458, 459 Markschies, Chr., 107 Marr, K., 420 Marranos (forcibly baptized Jews), 397 Mars, god, 225f Martin of Tours, 201–208 Martyr, 396, 399, 401, 403 Martyrs of Gorkum, 400 Mary, Holy Virgin, 40, 60, 114, 247, 249, 251, 252, 279, 280, 284, 292, 355, 364, 373, 375, 387, 393, 402, 436, 437 Masson, J., 362 Mater dolorosa, 393 Material images, 6, 183 Mathot, G., 456, 460, 461, 463, 464 Matthes, A., 420, 427 Matthew, apostle, 220, 227–228 Matura, Th., 281 Mauriac, F., 242–244 Max, G., 419, 421 McCrindle, J.W., 151, 153 McNulty, P., 76 Mechanisms of exclusion, 107–109 Mediator dei et hominum, 27, 457, 463, 467 Medici, Catharine de, 366 Mees, H.E., 322 Meijer, A., 463 Meir, rabbi, 157 Melching, W., 459 Mendicants, 58 Menestò, E., 281 Mennonites, 314 Menozzi, D., 378 Merz, J., 412 Merzbacher, E., 146 Mésenguy, F.Ph., 379 Metaphor, 7, 18–20, 37, 45, 52, 57, 59, 62–65, 67, 69, 82, 87, 88, 112–116, 144, 148, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167, 180, 181, 184, 186, 189, 193, 195,

500

index

198, 202, 205, 207, 208, 214, 244, 280f, 308, 341, 346, 347, 439 Metaphysical thought (Augustinian), 237 Metken, I., 410 Meyendorff, P., 76 Michael III, emperor, 355 Michalski, S., 299, 303–305 Michelangelo, 116, 416 Midrash, 19, 98, 100, 148, 168–176 Mildenberg, L., 146 Miles, M., 194 Milikowsky, Ch., 158 Milites christi, 112 Miller, O., 64 Minetti, P., 396 Minucius Felix, 19, 197 Miracles, 20 Modernisierungsvandalismus (modernisation of vandalism), 472, 480–488 Moeller, B., 308 Molanus, Johannes, s. Vermeulen, J. Mommsen, W., 409 Monarchianismus, 473 Monatschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst, 409f Mondriaan, P., 449 Mönnich, C.W., 203 Monotheism, 1, 3, 7, 17, 34, 37, 40, 50, 51, 62, 136, 207, 476 Montanists, 115 Montecassino, 484 Moore, R., 248 Moors, P., bishop, 462 Moralisation, 17 Moriscos (forcibly baptized Moslims), 397 Moses und Aron (opera), 14 Moses, 8, 14, 37, 42, 61, 62, 67, 98, 101, 134, 143, 145, 150–154, 166, 175, 176, 210, 243, 244, 303, 327, 440 Moulinier-Brogi, L., 114 Muehsam, A., 146 Muldoon, J., 114 Müller, D., 1, 17, 61, 107, 111–116, 120, 248 Muller, F., 332 Müller-Dreier, A., 396 Müllhaupt, F., 448 Muslims, see Islam Mystical experience, 97 Mystici Corporis Christi, 458, 467 Naef, S., 52 Nahman of Bratslav, rabbi, 8

Napoleon Bonaparte, 391, 393, 402 Narkiss, B., 146 Nathanael, 169 National Socialism, 12, 487 Nationalism, 25 Nationalistic Protestantism, 25 Nature, 38–40 Nausea, F., 365–366 Nazarenes, 412, 416 Nazi Germany, 96 Nazis, 27, 446, 458–459 Neercassel, J.B van, 375–376 Negative theology, 41 Nelli, R., 250, 252, 254 Neoplatonism, 170–180, 184 Netter, Th., 358, 368 Neue deutsche Rundschau, 391 Neue Sachlichkeit, 448 Neumann, E., 448 Nicholas I, pope, 355 Nicholas of Kues, 57 De visione Dei seu de Icona, 58 Nicolai, W., 420, 421, 422, 428 Nicolaus Cusanus see Nicholas of Kues Nicolaus of Lyra, 359 Niebergall, F., 426 Nietzsche, F., 27, 63, 64, 409, 425, 441, 452, 487 Nikolaou, Th., 55 Nipperdey, Th., 409 Nippold, F., 394, 395 Nissen, P., 203 Nithack-Stahn, W., 408, 424, 425 No logo (novel), 49 Noëtos of Smyrna, bishop, 473 Nolde, E., 450 Nordau, M., 459 Nordhausen, 284 Oberman, H.A., 303, 304 Oberste, J., 112 Obliterating bombing, 483 Octateuchs, 152, 153 Odeberg, H., 170 Oegema, J., 455 Omhoog ( journal), 463 On the Spiritual in Art, 448 Ongendus, king, 212 Opening Virgin, 363–364, 373 Operation Gomorrha, 482 Origen, 190 Os, H. van, 293 Osborn, M., 414 Osservatore Romano, 456f Ostini, F. von, 400

index Other (the) as mirror image, 125–127, 137 as other, 125–127 Ottaviani, A., bishop, 462 Otten, W., 2, 15, 33, 34, 39, 42, 59 Oudwijk Benedictine Abbey, 323 Padberg von, L., 110 Paffenroth, K., 182 Paganism, 7, 11, 389, 467 Paleotti, G., 368 Pales-Gobilliard, A., 263, 273 Paquot, J.-N., 360 Paret, P., 413 Paris (Mekka of culture), 472 Parochet, 148, 149, 151 Parousia (Second Coming), 18, 153, 155 Paschalis II, pope, 112 Passio Matthei, 227 Passio sancti Bartholomaei apostoli, 221, 222 Passio Simonis et Iudae, 229 Pastoreaux, 60 Paterenes, 268 Paternitas, 371 Patrimonium Petri, 397 Patschovsky, A., 115 Paul, 67, 109, 187, 205, 216, 303, 395 Pauli, A., 424 Paulicians, 108 Paulinus of Nola, 203, 356 Paulsen, D., 182 Peirce, C., 80–83 Pèire Autier, 249, 254 Pèire de Gailhac, 249 Pèire de Luzenac, 255 Pèire Maury, 250 Pèiree Garsjas, 251 Pelagius, pope, 226 Pelland, G., 182 Pennington, K., 263, 264, 271 Pera, S., 377, 383 Peretto, L.M., 229 Pérez de Ayala, Martín, 366 Pérez, J., 398 performative (character of rituals), 16 Perugia, 289 Peter and Paul, apostles, 395 Peter of Blois, 268 Peter of Bruys, 274 Peter of Verona (Peter Martyr, Peter of Milan), 398n Petrus Venerabilis, 268 Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, 266, 274 Peursen, C. van, 68

501

Pisa, 290 San Francesco, 290 Pster, M., 64 Phenomenology, 125 Philip II, king, 316 Philip, apostle, 220, 225f Philo of Alexandria, 59 De vita Mosis, 145 Quaestiones et Solutiones in Exodum, 145 De specialibus legibus, 145 Philosophumena, 472, 473 Philosophy (as idolatry), 136–137 Picasso, P., 447, 452, 460 Pierre Autier, 274, 275 Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, Hystoria Albigensis, 268, 269 Pierre Maury, 275 Pierre of Gaillac, 273, 274, 275 Pierre Raimond des Huhous, 274 Pierre-Raymond Domergue, 274 Pilate, 243 Pindarus, 476 Pippin, 213, 214 Pius VI, pope, 382 Pius IX, pope, 25, 388, 394, 395, 396, 403, 404 Pius XI, pope, 457 Pius XII, pope, 458 Plato, 58, 179, 180, 191, 197 Platonism, 180 Plemper, P., 335 Pliny, 39 Plotinus, 179, 185, 197 Enneads, 190 Polemos pantoon patèr, 473 Politi, L., see Catharin, A. Political religions, 12 Politics of representation denition, 401 Prussian 392–394, 401 Roman Catholic, 401 Pollmann, K., 15, 184 Poorthuis, M., 8, 17, 18, 125, 126, 130, 138, 447, 456 Porphyry, 179, 197 Port-Royal, 24, 377–378, 380 Postmodern hermeneutics, 64–65 Pouls, J.H., 460, 465 Prat, D.I., 248 Preuß, H., 427, 428 Prokop of Caesarea, 474 proportionalism, 19, 163, 165 Proportionality (principle of ), 374, 376 Protestantism, 23, 26, 34, 36–39, 41, 42, 309, 318, 399, 400, 402, 408f

502

index

Protogenes, 476 Proust, M., 238–240 Pseudo-Dionysius, 57, 197, 455 Public Reformed Church, 22 Puech, H.C., 249 Purcell, M., 68 Pyromanie, 478 Pythagoras, 66 Qah, J., 67, 68 Quaknin, M.-A., 8 Quran, 50, 59, 71, 479 Raalte (chasuble), 324 Rabbi Nathan, 163 Radbod, king, 212, 213 Rade, M., 417 Raimond Autier, 273 Raimond Issaurat, 273 Rambam, see Maimonides Rang, B., 389 Rappaport, R., 77–84 Rashi, 359 Ratherius of Verona, 354 Raynaud, Th., 368, 372–373, 379 Re-guration, 16, 66 Reformation, 3, 16, 18, 22, 23, 38, 57, 60–63, 75, 91, 299–310, 314, 317, 348, 389, 408, 467, 479–480 Reformed Churches, 23, 299, 322, 333 Régamey, P., 445, 458, 460 Regt, W.M.C., 342 Rehle, S., 224 Reifenberg, A., 146 Reischmann, H.-J., 201, 211 Religion (as epiphenomenon), 64 Religious identity, 20, 220, 415 transformation, 15 Religious imagination, 15 Reusch, F.H., 372, 399, 401 Reve, G., 26, 435–438, 440 Brief aan mijn bank, 435 Pleitrede voor het hof, 436 Een nieuw Paaslied, 436 Reve, G.K. van het, see Reve, G. Revelation ( Judeo-Christian understanding), 61–63 Revel-Neher, E., 146, 151 Ricci, S. dei, 381 Richard of St. Victor De quattor gradibus violentiae caritatis, 267 Richeome, L., 362 Richter, H., 451 Ricken, Fr., 108

Ricoeur, P., 16, 64, 66, 69, 80 Rijk, L.M. de, 180 Rijn, G. van, 332, 342 Riley Smith, J., 112 Riparelli, E., 260 Risorgimento, 397, 398 Ritual repertoire, 392 Robert Grosseteste, 59 De Sphaera, 59 Roeck, B., 408 Roger of York, 361 Rogers, E., 146 Roland Holst, H., 327 Roland Holst, R., 327 Role models, 390, 402 Roman Catholic Church – re-establishment of hierarchy in 1853 in the Netherlands, 400 Romanoff, P., 146 Romans, 477 Rombold, G., 449 Rome, 27, 77, 114, 146, 202, 207, 212, 226, 229, 259, 357, 382, 398, 401, 445, 455, 456, 460–462, 464, 471, 477 Rome (liturgical traditions of ), 16, 86f Rooden, P. van, 349 Roon, 481 Roosenboom, D., 335, 347 Roosevelt, E., 482 Rose, E., 21, 203, 217 Rosenberg, A., 412 Roters E., 448 Roualts, G., 450 Rouse, M., 236 Rouse, R.H., 236 Rouwhorst, G., 2, 16, 75, 87, 89 Rowland, Ch., 171, 172, 174 Rubellin, M., 219 Rudolph, C., 286 Ruiter, P. de, 329 Rule Earlier Rule of the Friars Minor, 280–282 Later Rule of the Friars Minor, 282–283 Rupert of Deutz, 358 Liber de divinis ofciis, 89 Russel, P.A., 309 Russell, J.B., 219 Russian Revolution, 454 Russo, D., 292 Sacrament, 36, 37, 39, 60, 61, 66, 68, 70, 315, 376, 447

index Saenredam, P., 319, 320 Said, E., 9 Saint-Cyran, Martin de Barcos, abbot of, 378 Sainte-Suzanne, C. de, 378 Saintliness / sainthood, 389–390, 399–400 Saints, 389–390, 402, passim Saints, protestant (see exemplum tradition) Sakralvandalismus, 477 Saldern, Chr. von, 480 Salemink, Th., 1, 13, 26, 27, 445, 447, 456 Salimbene de Adam, 284 Samerski, S., 396 Samuel de Poorter, 313, 314 Samuel, 214, 215 Sanders, M., 459 Sanders, N., 369 Sansculotten, 474, 480 Satan, see devil Scellès, M., 116 Schadow, J.G., 387, 392 Scharfe, M., 409 Schefer, K., 407 Schenkluhn, W., 288, 291 Schiele, F., 415 Schlegel, A.W., 390 Schmitt, J.-Cl., 237, 273 Schnackenburg, R., 109 Schneider, B., 14 Schneider, H.J., 387 Schneiders, S., 33 Schoeps, J.H., 12 Scholastica, 208 Scholasticism, 36, 38 Scholem, G., 165, 166, 168 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 100 Schönberg, A., 14 Schönmetzer, H., 53 Schori, K., 65 Schubring, P., 411, 419, 423, 424 Schulte, R., 392 Schuurman, A.M. van, 389 Schwaner, W., 415 Schwartz, G., 319, 320, 321 Schwitters, K., 452, 453 Searle, J., 84 Sébélia Peire, 250 Secession, 412 Secular movements, 11 Secularization, 12, 15, 63–65 Self-legitimation, 118–121 Sell, K., 411, 413

503

Sellert, W., 114 Senn, F., 91 Sensuality, 17 Sermon of St. Germain-en-Laye, 366–367 Servaes, A., 445, 450, 456 Shapiro, M., 166 Shekina (Shechinah) Shiur Qomah, 19, 165–168 Shrewsbury, 294 Sibille Peyre, 275 Sigebert of Gembloux, 354 Signs, 15, 43–47, 49–50, 67, 240, 378 iconic, 59, 91, 92, 146 deictic, 65 indexical, 81f, 91 metaphorical, 78, 81f (non-) verbal, 16, 77–80, 85 visual, 78, 88, 91, 239 Simeon ben Yohai, rabbi, 100 Simon, apostle, 220, 228f Simon, H., 391, 392 Singer, M., 115 Skarbina, F., 421 Slenczka, N., 68 Sloterdijk, P., 57 Small scale bombing, 485 Smalley, B., 116 Smend, J., 409, 426 Smith, C.R., 361, 383 Smith, W.C., 33 Social group [and image], 403 Socrates, 354 Sollicitudini Nostrae ( papal brief ), 24, 372–373, 380–382 Soreg, 146, 147 Sozomenos, 354 Spaans, J., 23, 332 speech acts, speech-act-theory, 84 Speidel, H., 485 Spirits, 50 Spitta, F., 409 St. Francis Master, 290 Staal, C., 23, 313, 325 Staal, F., Stabilitas in loco, 209, 211 Stalin, J., 12, 50, 483 Stancliffe, C., 203 Stark, R., 107, 108 States of Holland, 24 Stations of the Cross (de Haas), 456f Steen, C. van den, 259 Steig, R., 391, 392 Steinhausen, W., 412, 414

504

index

Stemberger, G., 357 Stephan, C., 487 Stephan, H., 424 Stern, F., 414 Steyaert, M., 378 Stirm, M., 304 Stock, B., 44 Stoecker, A., 427 Stramm, A., 447 Strasbourg, (bombing), 472 Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis, 269 Strauss, D.F., 409 Struick, J.E.A.L., 318 Stuck, F. von, 25, 416, 419, 423 Suárez, F., 358, 368 Sulpicius Severus, 20, 201, 202, 206, 356 Libri qui supersunt (Dialogi ), 202, 203 Vita Martini, 201, 202–207, 212, 215 Summerpalace, Peking, 481 Suntrup, R., 90 Surrealism, 13, 57, 467 Syllabus, 399, 401 Symbolism, 37, 39, 40, 419, 436 symbols, 16, passim discursive, 78, 86, 88 visional, 16, 88 Tabernacle, 143–154 in Hellenistic Judaism, 150 in Byzantine Christian works, 150 Takau, Moses, 158 Taliban, 3, 28 Talmud, 100, 173, 174 Talmud-Midrash culture, 19, 158, 159, 166, 167 corpus, 167, 173 Tambiah, S., 85 Tannaim, 147 Tau, 283 Templars, 117 Ten Commandments, 37, 127, 133, 144, 154, 321, 437 Tenderenda der Phantast, 454 Tertullian, 19, 197 Teske, R., 182 The Spiritual in Art (exhibition), 465 Theiner, A., 401n Theodoric, king, 478, 479 Theodulf of Orléans, 42, 46 Theology of the Cross, 251, 263–278 Theophany, 37, 38, 47, 152 Thiele, J., 390

Thirty Years War, 324 Thode, H., 418 Thoma, H., 25, 416, 418, 422, 423 Thomas of Celano, 282, 288 Second Live of Francis of Asssi, 288 Thomas of Eccleston, 284, 289, 294 Thomism, 15, 41, 58 Thompson, E.A., 115 Thou, J.-A., 367 Three-headed and three-faced Trinity, 24, 360–363, 372–373, 380, 382 Throne of Grace, 363, 370 Thümmel, H.-G., 53 Timmer, J.J., 462 Tirin, J., 359 Toorop, J., 327 Torquemada, T. de, 397 Torres, F., 369 Tostado, s. Alfonse ‘el Tostado’ Totila, 478 Trachtenberg, J.,115 Tracy, D., 56 Transcendence, 401 Divine t. as justication of iconoclasm, 91 experience of, 132f of the other, 17–18 of God, 17–18, 51–52, 137 Transsubstantiation, 60, 68, 249 Traub, Th., 410 Trinity of the Psalter, 371 Trinity, 6, 23, 24, 44, 55, 181, 189, 191–195, 213, 253–283 Turks, 112 Turner, V., 79, 80 Tuscany, 293 Twelve Year Truce, 343 Tyerman, Chr., 264, 270 Tzara, T., 452 Uhde F. von, 412, 416, 421, 422 Umbria, 292 Unger-Dreiling, E., 395 Urban VIII, pope, 353, 372–373, 382, 382 Ursonate, 453 Utrecht Buurkerk, 315, 320 Catharijneconvent, 293, 323, 328 Domkerk, 317–320, 327–328 Chapel of Pot, 318–319 Holy Sepulchre, 319 Domtoren, 287

index Geertekerk, 316 Jacobikerk, 315–317 Janskerk, 320–322 Nicolaaskerk, 316 Pieterskerk, 320–322, 326 Vaillant. A., 249 Valdès M.J., 64 Valentinianus III, 474 Valk, J.P. de, 400 Van Engen, J., 115 Van Uytfanghe, M., 238 Vandalisme libérateur, 472, 487 Vandalism, 27, 28, 308, 317, 332, 472–488 Vandals 27, 28, 471, 474, 477 Varckemoort ( pugna concionatorum quorundam cum porcis), 342–352 Vaticanum I, 401 Vaticanum II, 75, 76, 91, 445, 465 Vazquez, G., 362, 362, 368 Veeh, L., 425 Veltzke, V., 421 Venema, A., 463 Veneration of the Cross, 21, 187, 263–278 Verbong, B., 462 Verein für innere Mission, 413, 417 Verhulst, R., 319 Vermeulen, J., 354, 360, 363, 36323, 368–372, 379 Verres, stadtholder, 477 Via afrmationis, negationis, analogiae, 57 Victorinus Commentarii in epistulas Pauli, 263 In epistulam ad Philippenses, 263 Viktoria, German Empress, 403 Virtutes Philippi, 225, 226 Visio beatica, 46–47, 186 Vita (Marie d’Oignies), 264, 269–270 Vleuten Castle de Ham, 326 Vlierden, M. van, 322–323, 325, 328 Voetians, 23, 333–334, 336, 339–340, 343, 345 Vogel, C., de, 275 Vogt, J., 109 Völkerpsychologie, 425 Vos, N., 20, 201 Vos, R., 293 Wächtler, A., 420, 422, 427, 428 Wahlwiller, 27, 460f

505

Wal, J. de, 464, 465 Walden, H., 447 Waldensian Bible of Carpentras, 255, 257 Waldensian Bibles, 257 Waldensians, 281 Waldensis, s. Netter Walenburch, A., 368 Walenburch, P., 368 Walker, P.J., 114 War on images, 1–3, 12, 25 Warner, M., 364, 383 Weber, P., 413 Weekhout, I., 348 Wegman, H., 88 Wehnert‚ B., 425 Weibel, P., 3, 5 Weichelt, H., 410 Weimar Republic, 394 Weinel, H., 427 Weinfeld, M., 158 Weitzmann, K, 152 Weizsäcker, H., 411, 412, 414 Weller, Chr., 10 Welten, R., 69, 127 Werber, E., 153 Werne (chalice), 324 Werner, J., 421, 423, 427 Werner, Z., 393 Whiston, W., 147 Wiedemann, Th., 381, 383 Wilhelm I, king of Prussia, Emperor of Germany, 393, 402 Wilhelmian Germany, 25 William III, prince of Orange, 331–352 William Durandus of Mende Rationale divinorum ofciorum, 60, 89 William of Orange, 389, 319 Willibrord, bishop, 110, 211–215 Winter, J., 448 Wintgens, D., 460 Wirth, J., 60 Woerden Holy Sepulchre, 325 Wolf, H., 115 Wolska-Conus, W., 150 Woolley, R.M., 224 Word and image (tension), 1, 4 World (visible, as icon), 59 World Trade Centre (9/11), 51 World War I, 324, 445, 447, 450–456, 459, 481–482 World War II, 102, 324, 482f

506 Worms, 283 Wulf, J., 459 Wülng, W., 403 Wunderli, P., 255 Yannai, rabbi, 170–171 Yitzchaki, Shlomo, s. Rashi Yom Kippur, 148 Zaduska, Y., 236 Zaraoës (magician), 227, 231

index Zeddam Oswaldus-church, 322 Zen-Buddhism, 443, 465 Zerner, M., 248 Zimmerman, E., 420 Zoest, A. van, 81, 82 Zohar, 100, 101 Zwart Front, 463, 464 Zwingli, U., 22, 300, 303–305

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