Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (The Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Noble, Thomas F. X.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081224141X ISBN 13: 9780812241419

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009

Synopsis

In the year 726 C.E., the Byzantine emperor Leo III issued an edict declaring images to be idols, forbidden by Exodus, and ordering all such images in churches to be destroyed. Thus was set off the first wave of Byzantine iconoclasm, which ran its violent course until 787, when the underlying issues were temporarily resolved at the Second Council of Nicaea. In 815, a second great wave of iconoclasm was set off, only to end in 842 when the icons were restored to the churches of the East and the iconoclasts excommunicated.The iconoclast controversies have long been understood as marking major fissures between the Western and Eastern churches. In Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, Thomas F. X. Noble reveals that the lines of division were not so clear. It is traditionally maintained that the Carolingians in the 790s did not understand the basic issues involved in the Byzantine dispute. Noble contends that there was, in fact, a significant Carolingian controver

About this title

About the Author

Thomas F. X. Noble is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of several books, including The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Introduction

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.—Exodus 20.4

In the history of European art it is difficult to name any one fact more momentous than the admission of the graven image by the Christian Church.—Ernst Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images"

God's words to Moses, with Kitzinger's gloss, take us to the heart of a long, sometimes bitter, and always fascinating chapter in the histories of art, of Christianity, and of Western culture. This book focuses on one important but neglected and misunderstood segment of those histories. Between 790 and 840, in differing circumstances, and with differing aims and intentions, Carolingian writers produced hundreds of pages of intelligent, interesting, and not infrequently polemical writing about Christian art. This book studies and interprets those texts. In about 790 Theodulf of Orléans, with the aid of several of his contemporaries, and on the express command of Charlemagne, began to write the Opus Caroli. This was a treatise of several hundred pages that ostensibly formed a response to the decisions of the Second Council of Nicaea of 787, a great assembly that had put a temporary end to Byzantine iconoclasm. Just after 840 Jonas of Orléans—that he and Theodulf were bishops of the same see is purely coincidental—put the finishing touches to his De cultu imaginum. Jonas's treatise, originally begun at the request of Louis the Pious in 827 and completed on the order of Charles the Bald, responded to the iconoclasm of Bishop Claudius of Turin and to much else besides.

Writings about Christian art, or about what visual arts Christians might have and how they might use them, began with the apologists in the second century. Yet not until the eighth century did the Byzantine world sustain a serious discussion of the appropriateness of Christian figural art. The so-called iconoclastic controversy—as always the victors got to name the battle after the losers—has been called "one of the greatest political and cultural crises of Byzantium." More than this, it was "undoubtedly one of the major conflicts in the history of the Christian Church. . . . All levels of life were affected by the conflict, all strata of society were involved in the struggle. The fight was violent, bitter and desperate." Not surprisingly, then, a major authority can say that the iconoclastic controversy was "arguably the major manifestation of change and continuity in early medieval Byzantium."

Byzantine iconoclasm ran two courses. The first lasted from 726 to 787 and the second from 815 to 842. As noted just above, Theodulf wrote the Opus Caroli to respond to the council that put an end to the first phase of iconoclasm. Did a Western controversy exist? If so, was it a great crisis? Did it shake the (Western) Christian Church to its foundations? Does it reveal significant forces of change?

Usually the answers to these questions are all in the negative. The Western image discussions are seen as a Nebenerscheinung, as a "side show," to the Byzantine main event. It is usually argued that the Carolingians in the 790s simply did not understand the basic issues involved in the Byzantine dispute. In the harshest telling, the Carolingians are alleged to have lacked Greek books and learning, as well as an understanding of the philosophical and theological traditions of the Greek Church. In the mildest telling, the Carolingians had poor translations of the acta of II Nicaea, perhaps indeed a mere extract from those voluminous documents. Carolingian writings were, in any case, without discernible influence on the continuing course of Byzantine iconoclasm and, say what one will about the Nicene acta, the subsequent writings of ninth-century Byzantine image theologians were either unknown or unremarked in the West. Although thirty years ago Peter Brown said that the iconoclastic controversy was "in the grips of a crisis of overinterpretation," no one could then or would now say the same about the West. To this day there exists neither a comprehensive description or explanation of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm or a thorough account of Carolingian reflections on images. This book constitutes a first such attempt.

There was, in fact, a Carolingian controversy about visual art but its ties to Byzantine iconoclasm are tenuous and complex. Thus there is an opportunity to ask what the Carolingian discussion actually is linked to. I do not deny that Theodulf took it as his first task to respond to the second Nicene council. But I do assert that his response is rooted deeply in central concerns of the Carolingian court in the years between about 780 and 800. Goaded by II Nicaea the Carolingians expressed themselves in distinctive ways about problems that were important to them and that were fundamentally different from many, but not all, of the problems that exercised the Byzantines. Viewed in this way, the Opus Caroli becomes less an incompetent or uncomprehending response to Byzantium than a cunning, albeit unfinished and unpolished, statement of basic Frankish concerns.

When the Franks returned to the subject of images in the 820s, they were prompted to do so by the Byzantines and, as in the 790s, traced a distinctive path. Emperor Michael II, a mild iconophobe, wrote to Louis the Pious to enlist his aid and support and to explain his own actions in the East. Louis assembled his theologians. At Paris in 825 they produced a large dossier of materials that seem to respond only partially to the letter of Michael II and to correspond only in oblique ways with the issues that had attracted the attention of Theodulf and Charlemagne's other key advisers. Once again, however, the context for the treatises written at Paris in 825 is to be sought amid major preoccupations of Louis the Pious and his key associates in the first fifteen or so years of the reign of Charlemagne's heir.

At just about the time when Louis's theologians were gathering in Paris the Frankish world encountered a home-grown altercation. Claudius of Turin, the Septimanian, probably Visigothic, bishop, theologian, and arch controversialist, went on a rampage of image destruction and iconophobic propaganda. Louis directed Jonas of Orléans, who had presided at the Paris deliberations, to respond to Claudius. He did so by beginning his De cultu imaginum but under slightly mysterious circumstances laid it aside, unfinished. Other writers, however, took up pens—one almost said cudgels—against Claudius: Theodemir, the abbot of Psalmody and Dungal, the chief schoolman in Pavia, most prominently. Agobard of Lyon, meanwhile, weighed in on his own with a treatise that expressed reservations about Christian art much graver than those articulated by the Paris theologians, Theodimir, or Dungal, but less reckless than those of Claudius. Still other writers—Hrabanus Maurus, Einhard, and Walafrid Strabo, to mention the three most prominent ones—wrote on art too but did so in terms more approving than those expressed by Agobard and Claudius, yet quite different on key points from those of Jonas and Dungal. The context for this Carolingian logomachy is the turbulent world of the 830s when the Franks fought civil wars, endured foreign attacks, and attenuated the buoyant optimism that had characterized the reign of Charlemagne and the early years of Louis the Pious.

Standard works on Carolingian art history rarely discuss the treatises and documents just mentioned. To a degree this neglect is justifiable because many of these Carolingian texts about Christian art seem to have very little to do with art per se. As I shall repeatedly argue, controversies that were sparked by some problem having to do with art turned into major statements of or else quarrels about contemporary issues that did not have Christian art as their primary subject matter. Perhaps this is not so odd. Throughout history, heated debates about artistic representation, and the actual destruction of public and private works of art, have been by-products of other kinds of social, political, or religious movements. One thinks immediately of Protestant iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; of the political iconoclasm of the French Revolution; of the ideological iconoclasm of both Fascist and Communist states and their successors; or of contemporary American disputes over flag burning and public subsidies for artistic work that some people deem blasphemous or obscene. The iconoclastic moment in these movements almost always provides the careful observer with a sharp view of the stresses and tears in the social fabric of a given place or time. In short, I shall ask the reader to look with me at certain problems in Carolingian history in ways that would seem perfectly normal to historians of other times and places. That is the broad view. In the narrow view, Carolingian historians may discover new things here as I invite them to reflect with me on neglected texts and problems. And I hope to persuade art historians to think in new ways about the subjects of their investigations.

Thus far the large issues to which this book is addressed. The next few pages provide a chapter-by-chapter orientation to how the book actually proceeds. Chapters 4 to 7 form the heart of the book. The first three chapters are not merely introductory, however. By looking in detail at the period from the fourth century to the eighth, these chapters establish the language, issues, and ideas which the Carolingians answered, modified, neglected. The chapters are long, but each addresses a basic and coherent bundle of problems within specific cultural and chronological contexts.

The first chapter turns to the ancient and late antique Mediterranean homeland both of Byzantine and Frankish art and of Christianity. I treat several issues in summary, synoptic fashion. What kinds of discussions about art took place in the Mediterranean world before the outbreak of Byzantine iconoclasm? What exactly are sacred icons, and what place do they occupy within the larger context of figural art generally, of support for or opposition to such art, and of religious practices in the East and in the West? What kinds of discussions of art took place in the West before the outbreak of iconoclasm and what cultic practices, if any, can be associated with works of art in the West? Without here anticipating the discussion that will follow, for the purposes of this study I acknowledge that any image could be an icon, but posit that sacred icons are not images of a particular style, size, or location but instead images that did, or that were expected to do, something. They were images to which cult was paid. These are huge subjects with elaborate, complex, and contentious bibliographies. Our aim here will merely be to pick out certain key themes so as better to understand some basic Carolingian positions. In sum, Chapter 1 asks what language, texts, and precedents were available to be accepted, rejected, or modified in the eighth century.

Chapter 2 opens with an inspection of a few battle sites in the guerre des savants over Byzantine iconoclasm. Everyone agrees that the Byzantine iconophilia following the first phase of Byzantine iconoclasm occasioned the Opus Caroli, so it is imperative to explore what else Theodulf and company could have responded to. This chapter extends the discussion begun in Chapter 1 of how East and West were alike and different in daily cult practice as well as in theological speculation. Another important objective of this chapter is to remind readers more familiar with the West than the East that recent scholarship has decidedly reduced the magnitude of the Byzantine controversy, the above quotations from Ladner and Florovsky notwithstanding. Byzantine iconoclasm was uneven, episodic, and never as devastating in human or material terms as formerly believed. Proceeding to the Carolingian world with this new understanding of Byzantium in mind will help us to see that we are not dealing with the bizarre and inexplicable asymmetry of a civilizational shock at one end of the Mediterranean that produced only a ripple at the other end. Finally, another important objective of this chapter will be a slimming of the intellectual, primarily theological, aspects of eighth-century iconoclasm, East and West. For too long scholars, mostly Byzantinists and most prominently the Russians among them, have gotten away with both proleptic and cataleptic readings of the eighth century that permit virtually all understandings of sacred icons to have been present then. If one assumes that the soaring theological flights of ninth-century writers such as the Patriarch Nicephorus and Abbot Theodore of Studion were already present in the early and middle decades of the eighth century, or that the lofty early eighth-century theology of John of Damascus was pervasive at the time of II Nicaea, then it is easy to portray Theodulf's theology as an ugly, flightless bird. We shall try to interpret the history a little closer to the order in which it actually happened.

Chapter 3 provides a discussion of the Western background to the Opus Caroli. The Anglo-Saxon Bede (673-735), whose writings were well known to the Carolingians, expressed himself on art several times in a variety of contexts. We shall find traces of his influence. The popes, moreover, with whom the Franks entered into a solemn alliance in the 750s, were deeply distressed by Byzantine iconoclasm and explicitly objected to it on numerous occasions. From Gregory II (716-31) to Hadrian I (772-95) popes wrote frequently about the image crisis and held a series of councils that addressed images-among other things. Beginning in the 730s the Franks and the popes entered into increasingly intense relations with one another. There is some evidence that the Franks began taking notice of Byzantine iconoclasm in the 750s but the surviving sources convey little sense that images represented right away an important or interesting problem for the Franks. One task of Chapter 3, therefore, is to explain the differing perspectives of the popes and of the Franks on Byzantine religious policy in general, and on religious art in particular, in the central decades of the eighth century. Problems of rulership and church government were critical to those perspectives, but so too were cult practices associated with art. How was art actually used in the Frankish world, in Rome, and in Byzantium? In what ways did the Franko-papal alliance condition the partners' reactions to art, to Byzantine iconolcasm, and to one another? By the end of Chapter 3 the textual, political, and devotional scene will have been set with sufficient precision and clarity to make possible an understanding of Theodulf's work in his place and time.

Chapter 4 offers my reading of the Opus Caroli within the specific context of the Carolingian court during the most decisive, creative, productive years of the reign of Charlemagne. The chapter begins with a discussion of the making of the Opus Caroli that depends heavily on the magisterial work of Ann Freeman but that adds to her findings some perspectiv...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 081224141X
• ISBN 13: 9780812241419
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 496