Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre

1. The Deadly Iota: Hegel and Byzantium

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Figure 1

Miniature from the Chludov Psalter, fol. 83, middle of the 9th century, Moscow, State Historical Museum. © Moscow, State Historical Museum.

In his Aesthetics, Hegel famously stated that in front of a devotional image or icon, ‘we bow the knee no longer’ (Hegel 1988[1820s], Vol. I: 103): in the era of art, images count for their aesthetic value, not for their cultic function. But if Hegel proves to be the thinker of secularization, he has also anticipated the so-called ‘end of art’ with his no less famous statement that ‘the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of spirit’ (p. 103). At a time when the autonomy of the artistic realm is being questioned and new forms of image that cannot be subsumed under aesthetic categories are coming into focus, a strange mirror effect occurs, epitomizing striking analogies between an era of post-artistic images and what Hans Belting (1994) has provocatively suggested naming the ‘era of images before art’. At both ends of the historical spectrum, a kind of image emerges that cannot be properly addressed by the notion of aesthetic judgment and not even by their referentiality; what they demand is a reflection on their visual efficacy. Not by accident, Hegel – always keen to remind us that the German word for reality (Wirklichkeit) does not so much refer to what is the case (real) but to what is efficient (wirkend) – is fascinated with the Byzantine quarrels around images which, despite all the bewilderment, he reads as a quarrel around the efficacy (Wirksamkeit) of an appearance. Devotion toward these images, Hegel (1969[1822–1823]: Vol. 2, 410, trans. 340) says, ‘occasioned the most violent struggles and storms’. In defense of the bleeding icons, quite literally ‘streams of blood flowed as the result’ (409, trans. 339).

Hegel finds accounts of those magical icons, which allegedly possess healing powers and engage in critical interventions in battles. Despite the mindless sophistry, which Hegel sees as inherent in the absolute devotion towards these baser powers of passion, the new image type, emerging in the 5th and 6th century, conforms to the disengagement from mimetic depiction advocated by Hegel; the new images resolutely break away from the mimetic portraits of the Roman effigies as they are considered to be acheiropoieta, images not manufactured by the human hand (cheir), but literally acheiropoieta: ‘non-hand-made’ images of divine origin. The aspiration is not to produce a more or less accurate imitation; the acheiropoieton is measured by its efficacy.

The chronicles (see Kitzinger, 1954, for an overview for the preiconoclastic era) give accounts of icons, which, when placed on a pedestal, had the power to crush the surrounding pagan statues, yet heal the faithful believers. In one of the miracles of St Artemius, a diseased member is healed by applying the melted wax of a seal displaying the Saint’s face. In his Spiritual Meadow, one of the richest sources of the period which also reads like a 7th-century pilgrim’s Baedeker guide, John Moschos refers to the story of a woman who obtained water from a dried-up well by lowering a specifically ordered portrait of the abbot Theodore into the depths of the pit. Other texts tell about icons secreting oil, blood or dew drops which fall directly into the mouths of praying devotees. Some women seemed to have grown impatient while waiting for the miracle to come about and directly scraped off pigments of colour from sacred images, diluted them in water and drank the mixture until they were cured. But the miraculous icons were not only used for individual purposes, they also had apotropaic qualities when protecting entire armies, as in Heraclitus’s use of a portrait of the Virgin for his navy in the Persian campaign. During the siege of Constantinople in 626 by the Avars, the patriarch had holy countenances painted on all the gates of the Western city and he himself carried magical icons of the Virgin around the city walls which actively saved the city from being consumed by fire. ‘The more streams of tears you shed’, reads the eulogy by George the Pisidian addressing the Mother God right after the end of hostilities, ‘the more rivers of blood you cause [among your enemies]’ (Bellum Avaricum, quoted after Belting, 1994: 497). The miraculous images used during the wars then take their definitive seat in the basilica or at the palace, such as the famous Sudarium from Camulia, which was transported by ship around the Golden Horn for the purpose of displaying it in the palace of Constantinople as a protective Palladium for the kingdom.

If Hegel does not concede to a Weltgeist of the sea, he does, however, acknowledge that the Byzantines had a distinct form of intellectuality. In a lecture, Hegel calls upon a source from late antiquity:

Gregory Nazianzus says somewhere: ‘This city (Constantinople) is full of handicraftsmen and slaves, who are all profound theologians, and preach in their workshops and in the streets. If you want a man to change a piece of silver, he instructs you in what consists the distinction between the Father and the Son: if you ask the price of a loaf of bread, you receive for answer that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you ask whether the bread is ready, the rejoinder is that the genesis of the Son was from nothing.’

In contrast to his usual citation practice, Hegel does not quote directly from memory here but verbatim from Gibbons’ Decline and Fall (1776–1788, chap. XXVII, Vol. III: 88). The passage cited by the English historian, however, could hardly have been found in Gregory of Nazianzus since it originated with a different Cappadocian church father, Gregory of Nyssa. Leaving aside the question of the original sources at this point, ¹ it is worth delving into Hegel’s significant ambivalence towards the Byzantine world. Apart from this anecdote in terms of the history of ideas, Hegel’s significant ambivalence towards the Byzantine world is revealing. On the one hand, the account from late antiquity ends with the sentence: ‘The idea of spirit ... was thus treated in an utterly unspiritual manner’ (Hegel, 1969[1822–1823]: Vol. 2: 409, trans. 339). On the other hand, Hegel seems quite enthusiastic about the theological work on the term that emerged from the controversies over the image dispute. The term is ‘real’ in the Hegelian sense of the word wirklich (as opposed to the German word real): it is ‘efficient’. Even the shift of one iota means a shift in reality: ‘In the contest on the question whether Christ were homoousis or homoiousios – that is of the same or of similar nature with God – the one letter ι cost many thousands their lives’ (409, trans. 339) (Figure 2).

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Figure 2

Miniature from the Chludov Psalter, fol. 34, middle of the 9th century, Moscow, State Historical Museum. © Moscow, State Historical Museum.

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Hereafter, the question will be explored to what extent, in Byzantium of the 8th and 9th century – and perhaps for the first time in Western thinking – a consistent and comprehensive image concept has been developed, which at the same time unfurls a tremendous historical efficacy. From a historical perspective, the origins of the Byzantine image dispute have been traced back to multiple causes (Brown, 1973; Gero, 1977; Ladner, 1940; Yannopoulos, 1997; for an overview of the historic-political background, see Auzépy, 1990; Brubaker, 1999; Schreiner, 1988; Stein, 1980; Thümmel, 1991, and now the decisive synthesis in Brubaker and Haldon, 2011). The following reflections seek to reactualize an hypothesis that Georgiye Ostrogorsky postulated in his seminal essay from 1929. According to this hypothesis, the manifold theological, ideological and socio-political differences can be explained by a fundamentally different perception of what images are and what they should be (Ostrogorsky, 1929: 40 ff). It becomes apparent that the iconoclastic as well as the iconophilic theories (both positions establish elaborate systems of thought about images) in the end differentiate themselves by the degree of sovereignty they attribute to the iconic. The iconoclasts would then be on the side of Hegel’s absolute spirit; for him it is the purpose of the spirit to annul the outwardness and inauthenticity of the image (‘The image is killed off, and the word substitutes for the image’, Hegel, 1969[1808], part C, §159, Vol. 4: 51) while the iconophiles, at the same time, are on the side of a Hegelian concept of finitude and sensibilization in the sense of Feuerbach; in such a concept the image is not only a necessary moment of passage but also a means of incarnation that is not completely transferable to the Logos. While thought – as Hegel always stressed – sets in only belatedly: in the late antiquity of Byzantium the images had already found their way into ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit), even before a reflection upon their morality (Moralität) set in and the image itself became an object of inquiry.

2. The True Image

The growing significance of images in the intellectual cosmos of late antiquity is a testimony to the alteration that took place in the reporting of the siege of the Persian fleet in 544 on the Syrian coastal city of Edessa. According to the chronicler Procopios, who shortly thereafter goes on to describe the course of the siege, a letter from Jesus saved the city. But already half a century later the account changes and, according to the chronicler Evagrius, Edessa was not saved by a letter but by a thaumaturgic Christ-image (Evagrius Scholasticus, 2000[c. 600]: 225–228). The miraculous icon was brought into contact with water; the water changed into a flammable liquid and scorched the war machinery of the Persians (p. 226).

The story bears witness to the fact that, at the latest from the 7th century onwards, images had become proper historical protagonists, and yet, at the same time, the interpretation of these images grew exceedingly precarious. Evagrius’s description of a painting as not made by human hands (theoteuktos) undergoes a further medial transition in the traditional legend: according to a version that established itself in later centuries, the story no longer speaks of a painting but a linen cloth (mandil), in which, according to the legend, the body of Christ left an imprint. The icon conserved at the Monastery of St. Catherine illustrates this last version magnificently (see Figure 3). Arguably, on this point the painter has consulted John of Damascus, who is among the first authors to use this example as an argument in the iconoclastic dispute of the 8th century (John of Damascus, 1973[c. 730]: 51–56). In the media transfer from painting to the imprint on the cloth, we may witness a subtle transformation from the symbolic iconology of the Early Church to what could be called, borrowing a term from Georges Didi-Huberman (2008: 320–325), an ‘ichnology’, composed from ichnos, the Greek word for trace: referential, symbolic representation is being replaced by an image concept of a pure, non-arbitrary imprint. In competition with the Byzantine Mandylion, the tradition of the Veil of Veronica develops in the West. As its anagram, the Veronica easily turned into the vera icon or ‘true image’, such as depicted by Francisco Zurbarán (see Figure 4) (on the Veronica, the Mandylion and other Holy Faces, see Wolf and Kessler, 1998, as well as Wolf et al., 2004).

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Figure 3

King Abgar with the Mandylion, Tempera on Wood, 34.5 x 25 cm, around 940, Sinai (Egypt), St Catherine Monastery (after Il volto di Cristo, ed. Giovanni Morello and Gerhard Wolf, Milan: Electa, 2000: 92).

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Figure 4

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Holy Face, ca. 1631, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 51.5 cm, Stockholm, National Museum, NM 5382. © Photo: Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Images as tactile relics: shortly before the eruption of the image dispute, sources seem to compete with each other in the description of magical images. Whatever left an imprint on the material undoubtedly existed, and the visible trace became a witness to a materialized theophany. At the same time, paintings attributed to Luke emerged, which were unconventional types of portraits. The theory of these pictures was apparently only brought forth subsequently in the 8th century (Belting, 1994: 57–59; Cormack, 1985: 261): according to this newly developed legend, it was St Luke who painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary herself with child, a spatiotemporal simultaneity serving the expressed purpose to once again verify the pictorial authenticity (see Figure 5). Although, according to Paul, worldly existence only offers a vision in speculo et aenigmate, these ‘true images’, even though conveyed through a medium, allow a seeing from face-to-face and, thereby, become prolepses of the time after the end of time.

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Figure 5

St Luke Portraying the Mother of God, early 15th century, Tempera on Wood, 26.4 × 18.3 cm (Inv. Nr. 424), Recklinghausen, Ikonenmuseum. © Ikonen-Museum Recklinghausen.

The voluntary posing of Christ for a portrait testifies to a real desire to be seen, which becomes a central argument in the iconoclastic controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries. There is, however, an explicit expression in this event, something that popular image practices had internalized long ago, i.e. the concept of a divine figure, progressively gaining visibility. It is not the perceived similarity that legitimizes the images but their alleged indexical character: these images have a form (typos) that reproduces itself and leaves an imprint on any material that comes into contact with it (Vikan, 1989); the images repeat and substantiate the fact that a deity took on a sentient form. The Keramion or ‘brick image’ becomes the object of the people’s veneration; it receives its justification in a later source: the celebratory speech for the successful translatio of the Mandylion of Edessa to Constantinople in 944 speaks of an event, in which the face in the linen cloth was temporarily buried under bricks and left an imprint upon them (Ps. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 2007[c. 900]: 272). The Christ-depiction paradox finds an expression in the semantical game with the term graphein when the text says that the miracle shows how, for humans, an ‘indescribable figure’ (agraphou morphes) may nonetheless update and transfer itself (metagraphein) without any outward interference.

In this self-replication without loss of form, an economy of visibility expresses itself, which seems to veer away from the image proscription of the Old Testament since it lies beyond human endeavours of illustration. Each copy is – mutatis mutandis – also an original. Along with the acheiropoieta, the age of mechanical reproduction of the image commences: yet, the ability to reproduce is in this respect not a loss but, in fact, guarantees the aura. On the outer frame of what is considered the icon kept at San Bartolomeo degli Armeni in Genova (Genes) and which is considered to be either the original Mandylion or one of its ‘copies’, the scene is depicted: a priest walks down the ladder leading to the Mandylion placed on top of a pillar, cautiously carrying one of the many self-replicas the acheiropoieton has supposedly produced (Figure 6). But how can these magical images be reconciled with the Scriptures? What kind of relationship exists between the miraculous images and the painted icons? Is there something beyond the iridescent variety of their form that is common to all images?

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Figure 6

Detail of The Mandylion Legend: The Miraculous Self-Replication, around 1320. Gilded silver on wood, Genes, San Bartolomeo degli Armeni. © Genes, San Bartolomeo degli Armeni.

As sources suggest, the image contemplation, in a Hegelian fashion, sets in late, almost as if theology and philosophy were trying to catch up with an already widely-spread image practice (the attempt to clearly distinguish philosophy from theology at this point would, of course, be in vain, considering the fact that, for example, John of Damascus, 1982[c. 730]: 89 ff, translated the antique term philosophia as the ‘love of wisdom from God’). Yet, in spite of being a reaction to a specific historic situation, the Byzantine theorization of images exhibits an extraordinary argumentative richness which, in terms of its complexity and range, greatly exceeds the contemplation of classic Attic philosophy. In a time that asks about the ‘lives and loves of images’ (Mitchell, 2005) and studies how ‘images act’ upon us (Bredekamp, 2010), it would be more than useful to revisit a culture which ultimately turns out to be closer to ours than we had ever thought. A reflection upon the performativity of the image and its perlocutionary effects (Alloa, 2011) cannot avoid confronting the Byzantine formulations of the question. In what follows, an attempt is made to reconstruct some of the positions of the Byzantine image dispute (726–843) in order to establish whether it can be affirmed that the ‘pictorial turn’ which has been diagnosed for the late 20th century (Mitchell, 1992) actually found an earlier stage more than a millennium earlier, during the Byzantine Empire.

2. Basic Elements of the Iconoclastic Image Theory

The fact is well known: history is always written from the viewpoint of the victorious. While the iconoclasts destroyed the images of the image-friendly iconodulists (literally the ‘servants of images’), the iconodulists in turn destroyed the written manuscripts of the iconoclasts. On account of this damnatio memoriae, none of the image-hostile texts have survived in full; at best, the arguments can be extrapolated from what is quoted by their antagonists (as a survey has been compiled by Hennephof, 1969; cf. also Brubaker and Haldon, 2001). From these fragments, a contemplation in regard to the nature of imagery ensues, which belies the prejudice that the iconoclasts only approached the images with brute force (Anastos, 1954). In addition to this, newer research proves that the elaborate, image-hostile position was not only, as assumed for a long time, a reaction to the iconophilic writings of John of Damascus, but that, on the contrary, a reflected anti-image position existed before the emergence of the first iconoclastic crisis around 730, to which the image-hostile emperor Constantine V and his court theologians could appeal (Baranov, 2002).

Unity vs duality

In regard to the scandalous presence of the two opposing natures within Jesus Christ, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 laid down conclusively – thereby putting an end to centuries of inner turmoil within churches – that Christ had two natures, which were neither separate nor joined. In 754 at Hieria, the iconoclasts accuse the iconodulists of falling back into pre-Chalcedonian heresies, i.e. into the Arian-Monophysitic as well as the Nestorian heresies. Arianism and Monophysitism share the idea of a doctrinal unity: for the devotees of Arius, Christ is solely human; for the Monophysites, he possesses a unified nature, in which the divine and human nature are unseparated. Nestorianism on the other hand, advocates a doctrine of radical dual-naturedness: the divine and human nature consistently remain unjoined so that the Son of God and the Messiah must be two different persons. In Hieria, this Trinitarian controversy is applied to the issue of depiction:

1(a) If the painters assert that they only depict the human side of Christ, how does it differ from paintings of pagan prophets?

1(b) Yet, whosoever clings to a divine nature that goes beyond the depiction of a human nature, denies the Trinity and creates a ‘monster consisting of 4 persons’ (Mansi XIII: 260).

(2) If the painters claim the divine nature is already contained within the physical body, they are suspected to be Monophysites who do not recognize the ‘unmixability of the natures’. One may think here of the curious late mediaeval attempts of representing the trinity in the West, which were ultimately abandoned with the Counter-Reformation (Figure 7).

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Figure 7

Three-headed deity (‘Vultus trifrons’), around 1500, Painted Wood, 15 x 21 x 4 cm, Lucerne, Historisches Museum. © Lucerne, Historisches Museum. Reproduced with permission.

Victor V Byčkov (1980: 61) has encapsulated this double-reasoning:

The logic of this paradoxical accusation is in itself antinomical since at the base of it lies the aspiration to convict the original dogma of an antinomy that denies the thesis as well as the antithesis. Consequentially, a form of reversed antinomy develops, which confirms precisely that, which was supposed to be refuted.

The intention was to prove that the image worshippers at the same time separate and join the two natures: ‘From a philosophic–religious viewpoint, the iconoclasts unwillingly proved, even more convincingly than their adversaries, the veracity of their opponents’ position (p. 61).’

4. Basic Elements of the Iconophilic Image Theory

The image apologists indeed make an ‘ambiguous’ argument since they make the Janus-faced character of the image their starting point. ‘How can one be so imprudent to interpret truth and its shadow, the archetype and its depiction, the cause and the result as identical in nature?’ Theodore Studite asks (PG 99, 1220A). The identificatory image definition of the iconoclasts is not discredited by an opposing, uniform definition but by an affirmation of its relational diversity. As Hegel had already emphasized, the christological differentiation between homoousia (consubstantiality) and homoiousia (likeness of nature) is transferred to the image problem. The differential iota is injected into the determinate unity of the homoousia-doctrine, which, thereby, seems to undermine the apparent opaque consistency of the iconophobic doctrine: instead of homoousia (consubstantiality) the correlation between depiction and archetypical image is a homoiosis, i.e. a ‘likeness of nature’. Likeness is conceived of as a mode to denote affiliation and difference in the visible realm.

It is precisely this multi-pronged strategy, which opposes the unitary image concept that makes it possible to speak of an actual ‘iconophilosophy’ in Byzantium from the 8th to the 10th century. The image adversaries are accused of not being rightfully able to even raise the image question since from the beginning they had subjected it to political interests. In the meantime, orthodox theology legitimizes their image defense by deliberately abstaining from prescriptive dogmatics in order to leave the field to argumentative examination. Prior to every decision on whether images were admissible and to what extent, a propaedeutic had to take place. Accordingly, John Damascenus (1975[c. 730]: 125), in his third Discourse Against Those Decrying the Images arrays a catalogue of questions that iconophilic visual studies will have to deal with.

Firstly: what is an image?

secondly: why is an image produced?

thirdly: how do images differ?

fourthly: what can and what cannot be portrayed?

fifthly: who was the first to make an image?

Not all images are the same; in the same way, not everything can be image. If the image and the depicted object are identical, then it is but the depicted object itself and not its depiction.

Visible flesh

While the iconoclasts primarily appeal to the tradition of the Old Testament, the image-affirming line of argument is founded on the incarnation event of the New Testament. The point of origin for both is the verse in the Book of Genesis (1: 27), where God is said to have created humans ‘in his own image and likeness’. The much discussed paradoxical doubling of image and likeness seems to imply that the criterion of likeness does not already apply to every image. More than that, it becomes plausible how humans, on account of the Fall, have forfeited this likeness but not the relational image of filiation and how, from a christological perspective, via the incarnation of the Son of God, the same path is trodden again to restore humankind to the prototype.

In as much as the iconophilists try on the one hand to save the specific difference of the images, so they also require the dispositive of incarnation in order to guarantee congruence with the prototype and, consequentially, with the dogma. As set down by the Council of Chalcedony, the nature of Christ as ‘an inhabitant of two worlds’ legitimizes the double nature of the image as being, at the same time, corporeal and incorporeal, present as well as absent. In the examined phase, Christology and iconology are interwoven beyond recognition. Christ as ‘a corporeal image’ or as ‘a living image of the invisible God’ (PG 99, 501D; John of Damascus, 1975[c. 730]: 108) testifies to the legitimacy of his depictions but also to the legitimacy of all other images. Whosoever does not accept the images – thus is the recurring argument – denies the event of incarnation.

In the work attributed to Theodore Studite with the title The Synax of Divine Armies, the incarnation (ensarkosis) represents the historical caesura between a privileged seeing of the divine, which previously was at best reserved for angels and other mediating figures, and the extraordinary visions of the prophets as well as a seeing, now given universally, where ‘the being, previously invisible even for incorporeal beings is visible for [all] corporeal beings’(PG 99: 736D). The visible appearance has made humans ‘multi-eyed’ (polyommaton), just like the heavenly beings (PG 99: 737D). If previously the material (hyle) was a hindrance, it has been ennobled in the reality of the incarnation by the Son of God taking on the nature (physis), the density (pachos), the figure (schema) and the colour (chroma) of our flesh (John of Damascus 1975[c. 730]: 72). Not only may this flesh be depicted, as any other visible thing, but it becomes, in a sense, the evidence for the ‘will [of the deity] to be depicted’. Something passes over from the Passion of Christ to the observer if the person allows himself or herself to be affected by the pathos of the image; meanwhile the anthropomorphic purpose of the image has in turn resulted in the image itself becoming passible, as attested to by the anti-iconic violence of the iconoclasts.

In this iconophilic miniature of the Chludov Psalter (Figure 8), the iconographic motif of the torment of Christ on the cross is introduced into the image dispute via the lance of Longinus. The (eyeless) iconoclasts coat over the Christ images with tar and pierce his face so that the saviour must endure the passion of the cross yet again ‘in the image’.

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Figure 8

Miniature from the Chludov Psalter, fol. 67, middle of the 9th century, Moscow, State Historical Museum. © Moscow, State Historical Museum.

For Damascenus, who cites a passage from Pseudo-Basil of Caesarea, the images are the means by which the battle between good and evil is fought:

As [the devil] saw man in the image of God and in His likeness, he turned, since he could not oppose God, his malice against the image of God: in the same way an angry man, since he cannot hit the king, strikes his image with rocks by striking the wood that bears its likeness. (PG 31, 1456C)

5. From Reverence to Reference: The Reception of the Image Dispute in the West

This reconstruction of some basic conceptual moments of iconoclasm will likely indicate how much theoretical relevance still lies in the Byzantine texts for the contemporary discussion about image criticism. The fact that this potential has long been overlooked is, last but not least, due to the unique reception of the image dispute in the Latin Middle Ages. The translation of the image problem into a merely semiotic problem, which can be observed in the Latin West (for a more detailed account, see Feld, 1990, and Noble, 2009), may be a reason why it was possible that the range of the question about the visibility of the image in the Western tradition had for so long been dealt with as a subchapter of symbolic reference: it happened because the papal legates, present at the second Nicaeanum, had brought a Latin transcript of the files to Rome. On the basis of these erroneous and incomplete files (today they are lost altogether), Charlemagne ordered the drafting of the so-called Libri Carolini (ed. Bastgen, 1924), which is considered to be the Western response to the Byzantine image dispute. In turn, these books by Charlemagne (though most likely the court intellectuals Alcuin and Theodulf of Orléans and not Charlemagne himself were the authors) form the foundation of the Synod of Frankfurt in 794, which further confirms the rejection of any excesses in regard to images (Werminghoff, 1906: 165–171). The concluding Horos of Nicaea II clearly delimits the idolatrous worship latreia (from which ‘idolatry’ was derived) from bowing (proskynesis) or paying homage (timé) to an image. The image is neither a common object, whose glorification would be peculiar, nor a symbol that no longer has any more influence on the described but a medium through which – according to the formula of Basil – ‘honor passes over (diabainei) to the prototype’ (PG 32, 149C).

The conceptual difference is cancelled by the Latin translation when not only latreia but also timé and proskynesis are translated altogether as adoratio. Images, according to the authors of the Libri Carolini, neither deserve destruction nor worship (nec destruimus nec adoramus) since they are only unclear indications of something that expresses itself more clearly in scripture. Holiness is a criterion that can be established for scripture as well as for relics, which consistently display a physical causality, but not for images, which are never holy but at best more or less felicitous in terms of their resemblance. As an example, the Libri Carolini invokes the depiction of two women. The observer cannot determine which one of them is Maria and which one Venus. Only the titulus, the inscription, is able to clearly distinguish between the holy and the profane (Bastgen, 1924: 204). When, however, the image is dependent upon the word, it can in turn also serve its purposes. The traditional argument by Pope Gregory the Great states that images are ‘books for people, uninformed by scripture’ so that they may ‘at least, looking toward the church walls, read what they cannot read in the books’ (PL 77: 1006). The argument becomes, by readmission to the Libri, the basic model of the Western image concept of the Middle Ages.

The translatio of the Byzantine image concept into a discursive definition in the West is also not diminished where there is an affirmative reference to the transitory definition: when Thomas Aquinas adopts the quote from John of Damascus in the Summa Theologia (‘the honor of the depiction passes over to the prototype’, which itself has firstly been formulated by Basil the Great), he is not necessarily concerned with the image question but with the worship of Christ (there is a reason why the quaestio has the title De adoratione Christi – Aquinas 1956: pars III, q. 25). Thomas does not extract the passage from the Damascene Discourse Against Those Decrying the Images – they remain unknown in the Latin West until the 16th century – but from their dogmatic treatise De fide orthodoxa. Unaware of the image–philosophical background, Thomas not only misunderstands the author’s intention, he even turns it into the opposite. For the Syrian theologian every image refers back to the honour of the archetypical image: the honour of the servant passes over to the master, in the same way the honour of the Virgin passes over to Christ (PG 94, 1171C-1173A), for the Aquinian on the other hand – as exposed by Umberto Eco (1982[1956]: 158) – referentiality is not a property inherent to the image but to the sign.

Thomas now applies the sign concept – subdivided into the description of something material and something immaterial – to the image problem and for that purpose, he draws on Aristotle’s concept of intentionality outlined in De memoria et reminiscentia. The orientation of the spirit toward the images is twofold (motus animae in imaginem): the first mode of perception sees the images as a concrete thing (res quaedam) in their materiality (such as carved or painted wood); the second mode of perception, alternatively, is directed towards images, insofar as they are depictions of other things (imago alterius). The movement (motus) of the spirit has only a passing moment in the material image to reach the depicted object. If then the depicted object in the image is identical with the ‘other’, the prototype, then the image receives the same honour (reverentia) as the depicted object (Thomas Aquinas, 1956: pars III, q. 25, a. 3, 4). The reverence is not a problem of image quality but of the state of being of the depicted: hence, reverence aligns itself according to the reference. Thus, if an image is in actuality a referential sign, then even depictions of heathen deities lose all magical peril. The differentiation between sacred images and false images is lapsed, the image, now understood as the finestra aperta (Alberti), may now open itself up to virtually everything.

The unique paths of the reception of the image dispute in the West prove that the history of visual thinking has to be written anew. Whether we like it or not, our civilization is a Video-Christian civilization. After Hegel, it was Feuerbach (1841: 149, trans. 77) who was adamant in stressing that the Byzantine ‘contention concerning homoousis and homoiousis was not an empty one, although it turned upon a letter’. This controversy about the nature of the Second person of the Trinity is – just as in the controversy about the nature of the icon – nothing peripheral, as it touches the essence of what mediation anthropologically stands for. Christology and iconoclasm meet in their acknowledgment that the controversy is not about the nature of the transcendent, but about the nature of the sensible ‘medium’ or ‘mediator’ (Mittler). In a way the Christian religion itself has invented a world without a God (or, as one could formulate with Nietzsche: Christianity is the religion of the death of God). God, affirms Feuerbach, is no object for Christianity, only his mediator is; it is to remove this abstract God ‘to a distance, to negate it, because it is no object for religion, that the Mediator interposes’ (trans. 78).

When taking a new look at the modern debate about the arbitrariness or the non-arbitrariness of the sign, it is the very modernity of this debate that turns out to be far from certified. The Reformatory iconoclasts of the 16th century had actualized the Byzantine arguments in their own fashion, just as the semiology of Port-Royal and the Counter-Reformation did. John Calvin, who had dismissed the sensible image as a legitimate medium for Christianity, had instead defended the word and its capacity of abstracting from the sensible: ‘Take away the Word, and no faith will remain’ (Institutiones Christianae III.2.6). Feuerbach (1841: 4) replies in the preface to the first edition of The Essence of Christianity from 1841: ‘Take away the image from religion, and you take away its thing’ (not included in the English translation).

At any rate, and to whatever point of modernity or postmodernity one wants to carry this discussion about media and the transcendence of referentiality, the thesis of ‘mindlessness’, which Hegel attested for the Byzantine quarrels, clearly does not hold water. On the contrary: it almost seems as if the pictorial turn, which today covers all disciplines – and, thus, also philosophy – had an early predecessor in Byzantium. Today’s visual studies make the following clear: the questions John of Damascus addressed to his contemporaries (What is an image? Why is an image produced? How do images differ? What can and what cannot be portrayed?) are also – and still – our own.