Introduction: Thinking about Idols in Early Modern Europe

Introduction:

Thinking about Idols in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This essay is an introduction to a collection of six articles on early modern debates about idolatry. If the debates started in religion, however, they quickly generated political, philosophical, anthropological, and even scientific corollaries. These may appear to be abstract and theoretical questions, but they produced a complex set of answers with important consequences for many people. To see what was at stake, we need look no further than the New World and its missions. If the most frequently cited texts in the collection of articles are Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta, it is because the New World forced the reality of idolatry onto the wider European stage.

When does an image become a god? The early Christian apologist Minucius Felix had an answer. A log "is cut, is hewn, is planed," and is still no god. A stone "is sculptured, and is polished by some abandoned man" and still is no god. A sculpture "is set up, and even yet it is not a god." But, "lo, it is adorned, it is consecrated, it is prayed to—then at length it is a god, when man has chosen it to be so, and for the purpose has dedicated it." ¹

If only it were that easy. Felix offered just half of the story as David Freedberg has argued. Veneration does not produce that unhealthy power that idols exert over the attentive viewer. Rather, the opposite is true: idols are venerated because they exert this power. All images seem to contain at least traces of it. They draw our eye with ineluctable command, and force themselves on our attention. The image is just a representation, of course. It has been made by humans and can only ever gesture to an absent presence. And yet, images are also effective. Their ability to move us depends on "the possibility of fusion" between image and prototype. The crucifix is always only wood or stone, but its power comes from what might be called, with Freedberg, a "sacred contagion" that penetrates from behind the veil of representation. Indeed, its value as a religious object depends on this contagion. Worshipers know that those tears shed by the Virgin in anguish at Christ's broken body are, in reality, just paint over mute stone and wood. Nevertheless, they are moved by those specks of material. If not, why have a statue in the first place? "The miraculous object has an effectiveness that proceeds as if the original body were present," Freedberg notes, "but the difficulty lies in cognitively grasping that 'as if.'" ² Men do not choose to invest images with power over their imaginations and intellects. Even before images are prayed to, before they are consecrated, they already have that power.

Whatever one thinks of the phenomenology of images, there is no doubt that this super-human power of idols obsessed many people in the early modern period. An object that had no power to inspire attention and devotion was hardly a threat, after all. The enormous waves of iconoclasm that swept across Europe—Germany in the 1520s, Scotland in the late 1550s, the Netherlands in the 1560s, England in the 1640s—were not directed at decorative tiles, pews, or doorstops. They were directed exactly at those things that made the devout feel the presence of the divine. And no one was quicker to identify these powerful images than the breakers themselves, who, in their extreme acts of rage, confirmed the effects that these supposedly dead bits of wood and stone exerted over them. The man in Ulm in 1534 who defecated into "the mouth of an effigy of Christ" demonstrated his extreme revulsion at what was, in reality, merely a lump of brute material. ³ Perhaps, if asked, he would have insisted that his scatological exuberance was designed to show definitively the impotence of the...