In the days before the printing press, the availability of books was rare. Iconology was and is used to help instruct the people in the faith. Paintings and statues, stained glass windows, and many more things bring the Gospel to life.
These do not violate the first commandment prohibition of idols because, as has been said, they are not worshipped.
Jon
Jon’s answer actually typifies the standard defense for images in the West.
Word has since reached us that you, gripped by blind fury, have broken the images of the saints with the excuse that they should not be adored. And indeed we heartily applaud you for keeping them from being adored, but for breaking them we reproach you. Tell us, brother, have you ever heard of any bishop anywhere who did the like? This, if nothing else, should have given you pause. Do you despise your brothers and think that you alone are holy and wise?
To adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another. What Scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant, who see through them what they must accept; they read in them what they cannot read in books. This is especially true of the pagans. And it particularly behooves you, who live among pagans, not to allow yourself to be carried away by just zeal and so give scandal to savage minds. Therefore you ought not to have broken that which was placed in the church not in order to be adored but solely in order to instruct the minds of the ignorant. It is not without reason that tradition permits the deeds of the saints to be depicted in holy places. If you had tempered your zeal with discretion, you could certainly have better achieved what you wanted, and rather than scatter the flock that was scattered, and so have enhanced the glory of your name of pastor rather than acquired the guilty name of a disperser. But by following your own rash impulse you, as I hear, have so scandalized your flock that the larger part of it is no longer in communion with you. How will you lead wandering sheep to the Lord’s fold if you are not able to keep in it those you already have? Therefore we exhort you to lay aside false pride, and immediately to do all you can to call back, with paternal love, those disaffected souls that you know to be outside the unity of your communion.
For these dispersed children of the church must be called back, and those passages of Holy Scripture should be shown to them that prohibit the adoration of man’s handiwork, for it is written, “Thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” But then you should add that because you saw that those painted likenesses, made for the instruction of the ignorant, so that they might understand the stories and so learn what occurred, were being adored, you were so enraged that you ordered them to be broken. And you should also tell them: “If you wish to have images in church in order to gain from them the instruction for which they were formerly made, I freely permit them to be made and placed there.” And explain that it was not the sight of the story there related in a painted text that angered you, but the worship which had been paid to them illicitly.
- Pope St. Gregory the Great to Bishop Serenus of Marseille
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There are some who believe that God’s law forbids us to sculpture or to paint, whether in a church or any other place, the figures of men or animals or the likeness of any other object … [They would not think thus] if they considered the works of Moses, who, at the Lord’s command, first made the cherubim in the propitiatory, and later on the brazen serpent in the desert, at whose sight the people were saved from the wild serpents’ poison. Now if it was permissible to lift up a brazen serpent on a piece of wood so that the Israelites who behold it might live, why should it not be allowable to recall to the memory of the faithful, by a painting, that exaltation of our Lord Saviour on the cross through which he conquered death, and also his other miracles and healings through which he wonderfully triumphed over the same author of death, and especially since their sight is wont also to produce a feeling of great compunction in the beholder, and since they open up, as it were, a living reading of the Lord’s story for those who cannot read? The Greek word for
pictura is indeed
zoographia, that is, “living writing.”
The thing is, Western theologians (under the influence of St. Augustine) have traditionally prioritized the word over the image, which is subservient to it. The superiority however hinges on the fact that the fullest knowledge of the truths of the faith must be acquired from Scripture. In other words, the propositional content of Scripture cannot be fully articulated in painting or sculpture: images can represent biblical people and events, but it could never completely express things like the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes. Images could potentially
illustrate them, but only language has the power to adequately
state them. In this reading, the image should be for the illiterate what the written word is for the literate. This is part of the reason why the West has developed the art of illuminated manuscripts and
historiated initials: art is married to and pressed to the service of the written text. We could contrast this view with the “windows to Heaven” approach of the East.
