Western Culture Owes Much
To “Imagining” The Divine
One of my passions in life is history. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours reading about ancient cultures and discovering what we owe those men and women who helped forge the foundations of Western Civilization. While we tend to teach history as one long succession of wars, there were many other struggles…clashes of ideals, of values and the triumph of reason. These struggles often produced their own heroes, whose names are not as widely known or as frequently remembered in the collective consciousness.
One of these amazing individuals is Saint John of Damascus. If you already know who he is, give yourself ten bonus points.
You can probably also answer today’s question. What do rioting Muslim extremists in Denmark, the Taliban, a Byzantine Emperor, a Saint raised in a Muslim country, the Renaissance, Da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper and concrete Statues of the Virgin Mary you see in yards have in common? Sounds like the plot of a good mystery novel.
The answer is: they all relate to the issue of portraying religious images in works of art.
Around the world, deadly riots are taking place by extremist Muslims over an editorial cartoon in an obscure Danish newspaper which incorporated a likeness of the Prophet Mohammed. The fact that they may have found the cartoon’s message offensive is a secondary issue. The great “sin” committed by those who reproduced the cartoon was simply to embody an image of the divine.
Unlike our Western Culture, with its great reserves of tolerance for those who step beyond the bounds of good taste in exercising freedom of the press or freedom of speech, Muslims participating in these riots believe that governments should be held responsible for what private newspapers print. Further, they take personal umbrage from one image of the central religious figure of their faith being produced thousands of miles from where they live. Just how far is Denmark from Indonesia anyway?
Because of this key prohibition against religious icons, some Muslim groups have on occasion committed acts of “iconoclasm” against the devotional images of other religions. Yes, “iconoclasm” is a real word. It literally refers to the destruction of religious icons for religious or political motives. A horrific example of iconoclasm was the destruction five years ago of frescoes and monumental statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan by a then little known radical Muslim sect…the Taliban.
What people may not know is how close Christianity came to a similar intolerance for artistic expressions of the divine. In the early years of Christianity, iconoclasm was motivated by a literal interpretation of the second commandment, which forbids the making and worshipping of “graven images”. The Byzantine Emperor Leo III, in the year 726, banned the veneration of religious images and their display in public places. Like the Taliban, his soldiers and followers destroyed priceless works of art and persecuted those who disagreed with the Emperor.
Which is where Saint John of Damascus comes in. Though brought up under Muslim rule in the City of Damascus, there was a certain degree of religious tolerance afforded the Christian community in that city. John’s family were not persecuted and, from all indications, their Muslim countrymen held the family in high esteem. His father held an important hereditary public office as the chief financial advisor for all of Syria under the Caliph Abd al-Malik. John of Damascus succeeded his father in this position and was appointed chief councilor of Damascus after his father’s death.
John’s father had made sure his son was well prepared for his future responsibilities. When John was twenty-three, his father wanted John to have a Christian tutor to continue his studies. He found a Sicilian monk by the name of Cosmas, who had been taken prisoner in a raid on the Italian coast. John’s father had the man freed in exchange for teaching his son.
The Sicilian monk turned out to be a brilliant tutor and under his instruction, John made great advances in the fields of music, astronomy and theology. His biographer would write that John soon equaled the most learned of men in the study of algebra and geometry as well.
But John of Damascus was to have a higher calling…one that would have a profound impact on the way we view the world, ourselves and God. John was a talented and prolific writer. He wrote three treatises “Against Those Decrying The Holy Images”. He was able to attack the Emperor safely from his position in the Caliph’s court. His simple writing style also made his works more popular and widely circulated among common people, which in time incited a revolt against the harsh edicts of the Emperor.
I probably can’t do justice to summarizing his writings, but I’ll try. Basically it is that images of religious subjects are justified on the ground that while God is “without form,” God became visible in the Logos, which was made flesh. Therefore an image of the flesh of God, which has been “seen” by man, can be made.
John also wrote that “worship”, as a sign of reverence, has many forms. The highest is due to God alone. But Christians could also worship, as an expression of their reverence, those things connected with salvation…the cross, altar, religious statues, paintings, etc. John wrote, “I worship not the material, but I worship the fabricator of the material, the one who…through the material has wrought my salvation.” Pictures of God, Christ and the Saints were seen as reflections of the originals and not idols in their own right.
John was persecuted, for his teachings and one story is that the evil Emperor (this is starting to sound like Star Wars), even had papers forged to try to make it appear to his Syrian overlords that he had been disloyal. One story has it that his hand was cut off. The story has a fortunate ending. John’s writings helped influence public and religious thought leading to his vindication and another Emperor overturning the prohibition against religious icons. John of Damascus would later attain Sainthood.
Had the views of Byzantine Emperor Leo III prevailed in the East, it might have spread to the emerging kingdoms of Western Empire. It might have been imposed militarily on a later Pope. The great artists of the Renaissance would have had no commissions to create the religious masterpieces we so cherish today. Without the funding of the Church and wealthy religiously inspired patrons, would the world have ever heard of Michaelangelo? Would DaVinci have been just an eccentric inventor?
We can’t even begin to imagine a world where a group of our neighbors, driven by religious zeal, would go from house to house smashing concrete and plaster statues of the Virgin Mary or Jesus. While it is good to remember that those rioting represent only a small percent of the tens of millions of devout Muslims, religious extremism stands as the single greatest impediment to peace.
While it is heartening to see democratic elections taking place in Iraq, I have to wonder if the “foundations” for long term success have been laid. Our nation is founded on a Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech and of religion are central to those rights. Religious extremists believe in neither.
Perhaps somewhere in Damascus, Baghdad, Kabul or Cairo there is another man of reason. Someone with the courage to challenge the extremists. Someone with a gift for communicating those thoughts and inspiring a majority of their fellow Muslims to condemn violence and religious intolerance. The world needs another John of Damascus.
