RELIGIONS AND FIGURATVE REPRESENTATION

In Latin Christendom the controversy around images remained relatively circumscribed until the end of the 6th century at which point the mood changed, a fact brought to our knowledge through two letters from Pope Gregory the Great to Serenus^[1] Bishop of Marseilles after he had some church paintings destroyed for fear of idolatrous adoration [doc 10]. Through these letters, Gregory affirmed and defined a pontifical and doctrinal position about images valid for the whole of Latin Christendom.

The letters are first an unambiguous condemnation of the adoration of images, a reminder of earlier positions already taken by the Church Fathers. Yet this analysis leaves some room for a Christian use of images. The key issue of the debate was not so much images as such as iconoclasm, which Gregory condemned as robustly as adoration. In between, he paved the way for a novel understanding. To begin with, he drew a distinction between didactic painting (historia a narrative image retracing moments in Biblical history) and static images of a figure that is the object of adoration. These historia (and them alone) may be the subject of permissible imagery for their educational value: “For what writing presents to readers, this a picture presents to the unlearned (idiotis) who behold, since in it even the ignorant see, what they ought to follow; in it the illiterate read (“in ipsa legunt qui literas nesciunt”). Hence, and chiefly to the nations, a picture is instead of reading.”(Gregory the Great Book XI, Letter 13)

Here Gregory took a pastoral stand. Images carry a didactic value and can help to teach the substance of what is to be adored. Adoration is not bestowed on the image as such but on what it means and represents, which others can penetrate through the written text. Thus, for Gregory, images were a substitute, a last resort; As such they remained a useful way to keep the faithful to the straight and narrow. It fell to the pastor to interpret the historia correctly to his flock; the image anchored in the word is then understood as a message that must be deciphered so as to be understood. Where the bulk of the faithful saw a painting, the clerical elite was able to read its deep meaning. Storytelling imagery was thus granted a value equal to that of Scripture though for the purpose of a different audience and by different means, its purpose being determined by its users: images for the “unlearned” and the written text for the educated. After Augustine of Hippo^[2], Gregory was careful to introduce a clear gradation between text and image. Truth lies not with images – potentially fictitious and misleading – but with Scripture. The image crafted by human hands is, of necessity, imperfect and could under no circumstances match the only perfect image, that of the “Son”. Accordingly, images could serve as a makeshift for the unlearned, a technical memory backup for scholars but it could not fully replace the text in order to approach the sacred, the truth.

This oft stated and developed Augustinian position would durably inform the official doctrine of the Latin Church. By downgrading images without condemning them, it allowed for the possibility to create some. The person who drew or painted them must, like the beholder, be aware of the imperfect nature of the object. This, the status of images, arose precisely from their materiality and the fact that they reverberated something superior, pertaining to the spirit. Thus its usage was permissible provided the image was restricted to an external and punctual role of recall, a memory aid. With the setting of this gradation between text and image, Pope Gregory contributed in the long run to the mainstreaming of the latter, which, bereft of any sacred character, could not amount to an idol to be adored but made a useful tool to learn what must be adored, or to keep it in mind. Its materiality also endowed it with an unmistakable decorative value, which went towards furnishing churches with an ornamentation deemed worthy of God.