Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium

Abstract

Byzantine iconoclasm remains of perennial interest to the historian, the theologian, and the historian of art. The subject appears to be well attested by documentary sources- only for us to find these extremely and intriguingly difficult to use, since they are largely couched in a theologically- or hagiographically inflected language of apology and polemic that is not only very distant from modern habits of mind but also nearly impossible to pin down in factual terms. The result has been a plethora of explanations-indeed, what was already in the 1970s branded "a crisis of over-explanation. "1 Clearly, the advent of iconoclasm in Byzantium partakes of a multistranded series of causes,2 which are perhaps impossible to unpack in their entirety, some of them proximate and some belonging to a very long historical process. Moreover, because the issues are so fraught around a topic of such central religious importance to the cultural history (and historiography) of Western Europe,3 the attraction for scholars of every religious persuasion (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, not to speak of Jewish) as well as of no persuasion, or even of militantly secular atheism, is compelling.