RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Images and Image-Worship
x. 2; I Sam. xv. 23) appears to be Hebraic and not imported with a foreign religion ; and for the image of the brazen serpent (see Serpent, Brazen), which was abolished in the time of Hezekiah (II Kings xviii. 4; cf. Num. xxi. 4 sqq.), an Israelitic origin is positively attested. With this epoch the prophetic opposition to Yahweh images became determined, and the whole energy of the prophetic attack was concentrated upon Idolatry (q.v.).
In freeing the deity from the fetters with which sensual limitations chain man's inclination to worship images made by himself, art was 4. Effects not rejected by the spirit of the Old Upon Testament. There may be discovered Hebrew working in it a mental impulse of Art divine origin (Ex. xxxi. 1 sqq.; cf. II Kings xvi. 11 with Isa. viii. 2). But the exclusion of plastic art from the highest spheres which employed it in heathenism denied to it that powerful development among the people of God which it obtained elsewhere by illustrating divine ideal forms (see Art, Hebrew). With emphasis the narrator in I Kings vii. 13 sqq. points out that the artistic outfit of the buildings of Solomon was mainly due to Phenician art. So far as it did not serve idolatrous purposes, the art of the Old Testament did not go essentially beyond the purposes of ornamentation and decoration. Imitations of flowers, garlands, fruits, trees, whether of beaten work (Num. viii. 4), or carving (I Kings vi. 18), or graven work (I Kings vii. 36), or in wool, formed the adornment of buildings for sacred and secular uses (Ex. xxv. 31 sqq., xxviii. 33 sqq.; I Kings vi. 18, 29, 32, 35, vii. 18 sqq.; Ezek. xli. 185 sqq.; Ps. cxliv. 12). Even the animal world, in distinguished types, was laid under contribution. Lions appeared as throne-keepers of the earthly king (I Kings x. 19 sqq.); lions and oxen were beneath the bases of the la vers of the temple; the latter carried also the brazen sea (I Kings vii. 29, 36, 25). That in later times profane art applied itself to mural painting and advanced so far that it portrayed men can be seen from Ezek. xxiii. 14. In a very peculiar manner there entered into the older art an object which was not intended as an imitation of nature, but represented a religious conception, viz., the images of the bearers and keepers of the divine majesty, the cherubim (see Angels), which found frequent employment as images in the Holy of Holies, as ornaments on the folding-doors, bases, and curtains of the sanctuary. In the post-exilic period there is discernible an increasing tendency to oppose the employment of art. The stricter exposition of legal enactments narrowed the original life of the nation, as when, because of the abuse of the name of Yahweh, it prohibited employment of that name, as, in connection with the prohibition to worship images, it rejected the portraiture of living creatures, and by the influence of classical art after the time of the Seleucidse (Josephus, Ant. XII., iv. 9, XV., ii. 6, XIX., ix. 1; Life, 12) this prohibition was rather intensified than diminished. In Herodian times it was regarded as a law, and was supported by the authority of prominent scribes, that images of living creatures might not be erected in the Holy Land
(Josephus, War, I. xxxiii. 2; Ant. XVII., vi. 2). With a death-defying courage the observers of the law knew how to elicit a promise from a Pilate, a Vitellius, or a Petronius, not to bring the standards adorned with the emperor's image into the holy city, or to carry them through Jewish territory (Ant. XVIIL, iii. 1, v. 3; War, II., ix. 2-3, x. 4). In describing the ancient sanctuaries, Josephus, who refers to this rigor, attempted to post-date it, but not without disingenuousness (Ant. III., vi. 2, VIII., vii. 5). Classic heathenism avenged itself on the nobility of the early Mosaic opposition to its gods by the malicious invention that Pompey, when he entered the Holy of Holies of the temple, found an ass under the golden vine, the only and the main idol of the Jewish worship of God (Florus, i. 40; Petronius, Fragmentum 35). P. Kleinert.
II. In the Church : Although the primitive Church was not averse to art, yet it had no images of Christ, and Irena?us reproached the 1. Variant Carpocratians (Hcer. L, xxv. 6) for Opinions possessing such figures. In the Acts of 100-400. John, the apostle sharply reproved an artist who had made a portrait of himself (Zahn, Acta Joannis, 223 sqq.). The prohibition of images by the thirty-sixth canon of the Synod of Elvira (Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, i. 170) aimed to forestall any hindrance to the spiritual worship of God, thus showing that this danger already existed. Eusebius also opposed images of the apostles and of Christ (Hist. eccl. vii. 18), and exhorted Constantia, the widow of Licinius, to seek the image of Christ in the Scripture. It is a wellknown fact that Epiphanius once tore in pieces a curtain on which an image of Christ or of a saint was painted (ed. Dindorf, IV., ii. 85), although Ambrose and Jerome state that there were portraits of the apostles, while Augustine mentions pictures of the Savior and the worship of images. Gregory the Great had but faint disapproval for a bishop who destroyed images in his church because of the adoration shown them (Epist. xi. 13).
The use and adoration of images were especially popular in the East, this tendency being increased both by the assimilation of pagan con- 2. Eastern cepts, customs, and forms of worship, Abuses and by the Alexandrian Christology Lead to with its emphasis on the permeation Iconoclasm. of the earthly nature by the divine. The pseudo-Areopagite writings which made the symbols the actual representation of things invisible thus laid the theological foundation for a religious veneration of images, and consequently for their adoration. The word of Basil (De spiritu sancto, xlv.), " the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype," became the classical phrase in justification of this adoration. The extravagance of this worship was emphasized by the iconoclasts (cf. the letter of Michael the Stammerer, Mansi, xiv. 417 sqq.), who state, among other things, that images were asked to act as sponsors, that coloring-matter scraped from them was mixed with the bread and wine of the sacrament, and that the Eucharist was received from the hands of images. The opposition to image-worship became acute in the iconoclastic controversies,
Imag-es and Image- Worship Immaculate Conception