^ 110. IMAGES OF CHJ.IIST. 565
This alone, however, did not warrant images of Christ For, in the first place, authentic accounts of the personal aj> pearance of Jesus were lacking; and furthermore it seemed incompetent to human art duly to set forth Him in Whom the whole fulness of the Godhead and of perfect sinless humanity dwelt in unity.
On this point two opposite tendencies developed themselves, giving occasion in time to the violent and protracted imagecontroversies, until, at the seventh ecumenical council at Nice in 787, the use and adoration of images carried the day in the church.
1, On the one side, the prejudices of the ante-Nicene period against images in painting or sculpture continued alive, through fear of approach to pagan idolatry, or of lowering Christianity into the province of sense. But generally the hostility was directed only against images of Christ ^ and from .t, as Neander justly observes,' we are by no means to infer the rejection of all representations of religious subjects; for images of Christ encounter objections peculiar to themselves.
The church historian Eusebius declared himself in the strongest maimer against images of Christ in a letter to the empress Constantia (the widow of Licinius and sister of Constantine), who had asked him for such an image. Christ, says he, has laid aside His earthly servant-form, and Paul exhorts us to cleave no longer to the sensible ; * and the transcendent glory of His heavenly body cannot be conceived nor represented by man ; besides, the second commandment forbids the making to ourselves any likeness of anything in heaven or in earth. He had taken away from a lady an image of Christ and of Paul, lest it should seem as if Christians, like the idolaters, carried their God about in images. Believers ought rather to fix their mental eye, above all, upon the divinity of Christ, and, for this purpose, to purify their hearts ; since only the pure in heart shall see God.' The same Eusebius, how-
' Kirchengesch., vol. iii. p. 550 (Germ. ed.).
* Comp. 2 Cor. v. 16.
' In Harduin, Collect, concil. torn. iv. p. 406. A fragment of this letter of Euse bius s preserved in the acts of the council of the Iconoclasts at Constantinople ia ^54, %nd in the sixth act of the second council of Nice in '787.
566 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 811-590.
ever, relates of Constaiitine, without tlie slightest disapproval, that, in his Christian zeal, lie caused the public monmneuts in the foniiri of the new imperial city to be adorned with symbolical representations of Christ, to wit, with figures of the good Shepherd and of Daniel in the lion's den.' lie likewise tells us, that the woman of the issue of blood, after her miraculous cure (Matt. ix. 20), and out of gratitude for it, erected before her dwelling in Csesarea Philippi (Panoas) two brazen statues, the figure of a kneeling woman, and of a venerable man (Christ) extending his hand to help her, and that he had seen these statues with his own eyes at Paneas." In the same place he speaks also of pictures (probably Carpocratian) of Christ and the apostles Peter and Paul, which he liad seen, and observes tliat these cannot be wondered at in those who were formerly heathen^ and who had been accustomed to testify their gratitude towards their benefactors in this way.
The narrow fanatic Epiphanius of Cyprus (f 403) also seema to have been an opponent of images. For when he saw the picture of Christ or a saint ' on the altar-curtain in Anablatha, a village of Palestine, he tore away the curtain, because it was contrary to the Scriptures to hang up the picture of a man in the church, and he advised the officers to use the cloth for winding the corpse of some poor person." This arbitrary conduct, however, excited great indignation, and Epiphanius found himself obliged to restore the injury to the village church by another curtain.
2. The prevalent spirit of the age already very decidedly
' Vita Const, iii. c. 49.
' Hist. Eccl. lib. vii. cap. 18. According to Philostorgius (vii. 3), it was for a long time unlcnown whom the statues at Paneaa represented, until a medicinal plant was discovered at their feet, and then they were transferred to the sacristy. The emperor Julian destroyed them, and substituted his own statue, which was riven by lifjhtning (Sozom. v. 21). Probably that statue of Christ was a monument of Hadrian or some other emperor, to whom the Phcnicians did obeisance in the fonii of a kneeling woman. Similar representations are to be seen upon coins, particularlt of the time of Hadrian.
* " Imaginem quasi Christi vel sancti cujusdam."
* Epiph. Ep. ad Joann. Hierosolym., which Jerome has preserved in a Latic translation. The Iconoclastic council at Constantinople in 754 cited several works oi Epiphanius against images, the genuineness of which, however, is suspicious.