The primitive Christians
were possessed with an unconquerable repugnance to the use and abuse of images; and this aversion may be ascribed to their
descent from the Jews, and their enmity to the Greeks. The Mosaic law had severely proscribed all representations of the Deity;
and that precept was firmly established in the principles and practice of the chosen people. The wit of the Christian apologists
was pointed against the foolish idolaters, who bowed before the workmanship of their own hands; the images of brass and marble,
which, had they been endowed with sense and motion, should have started rather from the pedestal to adore the creative powers
of the artist. Perhaps
some recent and imperfect converts of the Gnostic tribe might crown the statues of Christ and St. Paul with the profane honors
which they paid to those of Aristotle and Pythagoras; but the public
religion of the Catholics was uniformly simple and spiritual; and the first notice of the use of pictures is in the censure
of the council of Illiberis, three hundred years after the Christian aera. Under the successors of Constantine, in the peace
and luxury of the triumphant church, the more prudent bishops condescended to indulge a visible superstition, for the benefit
of the multitude; and, after the ruin of Paganism, they were no longer restrained by the apprehension of an odious parallel.
The first introduction of a symbolic worship was in the veneration of the cross, and of relics. The saints and martyrs, whose
intercession was implored, were seated on the right hand if God; but the gracious and often supernatural favors, which, in
the popular belief, were showered round their tomb, conveyed an unquestionable sanction of the devout pilgrims, who visited,
and touched, and kissed these lifeless remains, the memorials of their merits and sufferings. But a memorial, more interesting than the skull or the sandals of a departed worthy, is the faithful
copy of his person and features, delineated by the arts of painting or sculpture. In every age, such copies, so congenial
to human feelings, have been cherished by the zeal of private friendship, or public esteem: the images of the Roman emperors
were adored with civil, and almost religious, honors; a reverence less ostentatious, but more sincere, was applied to the
statues of sages and patriots; and these profane virtues, these splendid sins, disappeared in the presence of the holy men,
who had died for their celestial and everlasting country. At first, the experiment was made with caution and scruple; and
the venerable pictures were discreetly allowed to instruct the ignorant, to awaken the cold, and to gratify the prejudices
of the heathen proselytes. By a slow though inevitable progression, the honors of the original were transferred to the copy:
the devout Christian prayed before the image of a saint; and the Pagan rites of genuflection, luminaries, and incense, again
stole into the Catholic church. The scruples of reason, or piety, were silenced by the strong evidence of visions and miracles;
and the pictures which speak, and move, and bleed, must be endowed with a divine energy, and may be considered as the proper
objects of religious adoration. The most audacious pencil might tremble in the rash attempt of defining, by forms and colors,
the infinite Spirit, the eternal Father, who pervades and sustains the universe. But
the superstitious mind was more easily reconciled to paint and to worship the angels, and, above all, the Son of God, under
the human shape, which, on earth, they have condescended to assume. The second person of the Trinity had been clothed with
a real and mortal body; but that body had ascended into heaven: and, had not some similitude been presented to the eyes of
his disciples, the spiritual worship of Christ might have been obliterated by the visible relics and representations of the
saints. A similar indulgence was requisite and propitious for the Virgin Mary: the place of her burial was unknown; and the
assumption of her soul and body into heaven was adopted by the credulity of the Greeks and Latins. The use, and even the worship,
of images was firmly established before the end of the sixth century: they were fondly cherished by the warm imagination of
the Greeks and Asiatics: the Pantheon and Vatican were adorned with the emblems of a new superstition; but this semblance
of idolatry was more coldly entertained by the rude Barbarians and the Arian clergy of the West. The bolder forms of sculpture,
in brass or marble, which peopled the temples of antiquity, were offensive to the fancy or conscience of the Christian Greeks:
and a smooth surface of colors has ever been esteemed a more decent and harmless mode of imitation.
The merit and effect
of a copy depends on its resemblance with the original; but the primitive Christians were ignorant of the genuine features
of the Son of God, his mother, and his apostles: the statue of Christ at Paneas in Palestine* was more probably that of some temporal savior; the Gnostics and their profane monuments
were reprobated; and the fancy of the Christian artists could only be guided by the clandestine imitation of some heathen
model. In this distress, a bold and dexterous invention assured at once the likeness of the image and the innocence of the
worship. A new super structure of fable was raised on the popular basis of a Syrian legend, on the correspondence of Christ
and Abgarus, so famous in the days of Eusebius, so reluctantly deserted by our modern advocates. The bishop of Caesarea records the epistle, but he most
strangely forgets the picture of Christ; the perfect impression of
his face on a linen, with which he gratified the faith of the royal stranger who had invoked his healing power, and offered
the strong city of Edessa to protect him against the malice of the Jews. The ignorance of the primitive church is explained
by the long imprisonment of the image in a niche of the wall, from whence, after an oblivion of five hundred years, it was
released by some prudent bishop, and seasonably presented to the devotion of the times. Its first and most glorious exploit
was the deliverance of the city from the arms of Chosroes Nushirvan; and it was soon revered as a pledge of the divine promise,
that Edessa should never be taken by a foreign enemy. It is true, indeed, that the text of Procopius ascribes the double deliverance
of Edessa to the wealth and valor of her citizens, who purchased the absence and repelled the assaults of the Persian monarch.
He was ignorant, the profane historian, of the testimony which he is compelled to deliver in the ecclesiastical page of Evagrius,
that the Palladium was exposed on the rampart, and that the water which had been sprinkled on the holy face, instead of quenching,
added new fuel to the flames of the besieged. After this important service, the image of Edessa was preserved with respect
and gratitude; and if the Armenians rejected the legend, the more credulous Greeks adored the similitude, which was not the
work of any mortal pencil, but the immediate creation of the divine original. The style and sentiments of a Byzantine hymn
will declare how far their worship was removed from the grossest idolatry. "How can we with mortal eyes contemplate this image,
whose celestial splendor the host of heaven presumes not to behold? He who dwells in heaven, condescends this day to visit
us by his venerable image; He who is seated on the cherubim, visits us this day by a picture, which the Father has delineated
with his immaculate hand, which he has formed in an ineffable manner, and which we sanctify by adoring it with fear and love."
Before the end of the sixth century, these images, made without hands, (in Greek it is a single word, were propagated in the camps and cities of the Eastern empire: they were the objects of worship, and the instruments of miracles; and in the hour
of danger or tumult, their venerable presence could revive the hope, rekindle the courage, or repress the fury, of the Roman
legions. Of these pictures, the far greater part, the transcripts of a human pencil, could only pretend to a secondary likeness
and improper title: but there were some of higher descent, who derived their resemblance from an immediate contact with the
original, endowed, for that purpose, with a miraculous and prolific virtue. The most ambitious aspired from a filial to a
fraternal relation with the image of Edessa; and such is the veronica of Rome, or Spain, or Jerusalem, which Christ in his
agony and bloody sweat applied to his face, and delivered to a holy matron. The fruitful precedent was speedily transferred
to the Virgin Mary, and the saints and martyrs. In the church of Diospolis, in Palestine, the features of the Mother of God were deeply inscribed in a marble column; the East and West have been decorated by the
pencil of St. Luke; and the Evangelist, who was perhaps a physician, has been forced to exercise the occupation of a painter,
so profane and odious in the eyes of the primitive Christians. The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel
of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated
by monkish artists in the last degeneracy of taste and genius.
*After removing some rubbish of miracle and inconsistency, it may be allowed,
that as late as the year 300, Paneas in Palestine was decorated with a bronze statue, representing a grave personage wrapped
in a cloak, with a grateful or suppliant female kneeling before him, and that an inscription was perhaps inscribed on the
pedestal. By the Christians, this group was foolishly explained of their founder and the poor woman whom he had cured of the
bloody flux, (Euseb. vii. 18, Philostorg. vii. 3, &c.) M. de Beausobre more reasonably conjectures the philosopher Apollonius,
or the emperor Vespasian: in the latter supposition, the female is a city, a province, or perhaps the queen Berenice, (Bibliotheque
Germanique, tom. xiii. p. 1 - 92.)
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