CIVILISATION AND DESTRUCTION

Humanity is a complex phenomenon and throughout history opposing currents of thought have done battle - Order and Chaos, Stability and Reform, Status Quo and Movement, Subjection and Liberation. These currents pull us in contradictory ways and we embrace bits but not all of the grand claims made by politicians or religious leaders. He who embraces every jot and tittle of any programme is variously labelled a fanatic, a fool, or a visionary genius. I want particularly to concentrate in this piece about the age-old conflict between Beauty and Iconoclasm, about those who cherish depictions of noble, historic and divine images and the statue-topplers who object to them with grim determination, and the lessons we can learn

 Iconoclast at work, 9th Century Psalter   6th Century icon, St Catherine's Monastery

 

For centuries, the enemies of the Egyptian Pharaohs would deface their monuments (e.g. the Sphinx), the Mosaic laws forbad Jews from the worship of “graven images” and Jews and Christians promised to obey the 1st Commandment outlawing idolatry. The Muslims deprecated any depiction of the Prophet himself but tolerated their icon-loving Orthodox subjects. However, in time the example of the ever-stronger Muslims sowed doubts in the Orthodox and the Byzantine Empire was convulsed in the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8^th and 9^th centuries AD, pitting the Eastern against the Western citizens, the Church against the Emperor. Eventually the iconodules prevailed, but the Byzantine Empire was weakened and the patriarch of Constantinople lost his status as equal to the Pope in Rome. In 1453 Constantinople itself fell to the Ottoman Turks, less tolerant than their predecessors, and the magnificent St Sophia had its icons desecrated, with many painted over, being replaced by Islamic calligraphy and banners in a display of triumphalism until 1919.

  

Moving on to the reformation in Europe, Luther was not an iconoclast and Henry VIII revered images. It was later, in the reign of Edward VI and then Elizabeth I, that all images associated with Catholics and, in particular, Mariolatry, became targets. Roving bands of Puritan iconoclasts smashed the statues of saints, stained glass or images of Mary – the desecration of the Decorated Gothic Lady Chapel in the 1540s at Ely Cathedral being just one example. In Europe the followers of Zwingli and Jean Calvin in Switzerland and of John Knox in Scotland insisted on the atmosphere of austerity so typical of radical Protestantism. While the old Church was corrupt, the Protestant Reformation destroyed much beauty which is still missed.

      A decapitated statue at Ely            The Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral

Efforts to re-write history, very evident in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, are still with us. In the American South, statues honouring Confederate generals are understandably resented by those whose ancestors suffered slavery. Similarly, in Bristol, once a centre of the slave trade, a statue to slaver Edward Colston was toppled and dumped in the harbour in 2020. In Afghanistan, the extremist Taliban gratuitously dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 in an act of ideological vandalism. After anti-clerical Kemal Ataturk decreed in 1934 that St Sophia should be a museum, Turkish dictator Erdogan decided in 2020 to re-instate Muslim worship there amid the protests of the Greek and Russian Orthodox.

                                                                                                                                                                                               The  Bamiyan Buddhas                         Colston's Statue dumped

There is much political theatre in these episodes but also strong emotions and – that dangerous expression, - “time -honoured”, beliefs on parade. We rely on tactful diplomacy and sweet reason to get over these difficulties, but very often agreement is not possible. ‘Twas ever thus!

 

SMD

17.11.20

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2020