Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!pacbell.com!att!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: The Shroud of Turin Message-ID: Date: 14 Apr 91 00:43:35 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 42 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: > such people. One of the bigger disputes in church history in Western > Europe was that between the iconoclasts (the people who wanted to smash > "idols") and the iconodules (the people who saw nothing wrong with being > respectful to and worshiping _through_ "images"). This clash preceded > the Reformation by a century or so, and was one of the factors behind it. ????? The iconoclasm dispute was in 8th century Byzantium. The emperor Leo the Isaurian, having successfully withstood siege of Constantinopolis by the Arabs, launched a campaign for suppressing images. It is at least a fairly reasonable speculation that the iconoclastic movement may have owed some of its impetus to an emulation of the strict prohibition of images in Islam. In any case, the Byzantine movement, like Protestant suspicions of Catholic statuary -- and as a sort of distant cousin to the Muslim feeling -- took the "no graven images" bit very seriously -- and with a very exaggerated application. To that extent there is some common ground between the earlier Eastern and the later Western reactions to highly visually-oriented worship. After a generation or so, the reaction against this kind of "puritanism" gathered enough weight to condemn iconoclasm at a general council (under the emperess Irene). There was a more minor swing of the pendulum in the 9th century, through one more cycle of imperially approved and thereafter disapproved iconoclasm, after which the Eastern church stabilized on its now-millenium-old usage of icons (which is, incidentally, a highly special topic, and shouldn't generally be dealt with by ignorant Westerners like me. My remarks are entirely directed at the civil history, and church-state relations of the Byzantines.) I am not aware of any similar kind of thing in the West. The reformers did object to images, particulary statuary, of Mary and the saints, as being dangerously verging on idolatry. This was NOT a movement against images in general -- though it is the sort of thing behind mutilation of cathedrals in France and England in religious warfare. -- Michael L. Siemon We must know the truth, and we must m.siemon@ATT.COM love the truth we know, and we must ...!att!attunix!mls act according to the measure of our love. standard disclaimer -- Thomas Merton