Pagans and their Images

Pagans and their Images April 21, 2016

Paul’s criticism of idols in his Athens speech repeats philosophical commonplaces about the nature of God and the difference between God and images, commonplaces as old as Plato and as contemporary as Seneca. But they were philosophical commonplaces. Lane Fox has pointed out that the philosophical skepticism about images was not shared by worshipers: “the identification of god and image was very strong at all levels of society” (quoted by Kavin Rowe, World Upside Down, 35).

Rowe thinks Lane Fox’s claim may be exaggerated, but he also offers evidence for popular identification of image and god. Rowe writes, “The power of images was, moreover, hardly limited to the ‘’supernatural’’ effect of an otherwise dead piece of stone or wood. Indeed, images of the gods could appear to be alive. Even Lucian, satirist and skeptic though he was, tells of a statue of Apollo that moves, sweats, spins, and leaps from one priest to another. This god, in fact, speaks ‘without priests or prophets.’ Despite Lucian’s silence, we may be tempted to discern trickery here or, at best, to read the events symbolically. But this is to move immediately into modern intellectual space and, hence, to work anachronistically. As one scholar put it when commenting on this particular passage, for the ancients ‘’this image was a god, its actions were supernatural, its utterances oracular.’ So, too, within a less explicitly public sphere, evidence remains of ‘‘secret rites which were thought to ‘animate’ [statues] and draw a divine ‘presence’ into their material.’ Political emissaries brought images with them for assistance or had them shipped. Travelers carried statuette on their journeys. Statues worked miracles, cured diseases, changed expressions, or less positively, were buried, flogged, chained, banished, defamed, lusted after, and so on, In short, despite traditions of critical reflection, the practice of viewing ‘’shrines made by human hands’ as habitations of divine figures was an essential component of the larger pagan construal of reality” (36).

Philosophical commonplace or not, Paul’s assault on idolatry is rooted not in philosophy but, Rowe argues, “in the transcendence of the Creator God over the world of images.” Luke’s aim was “to break the connection between God and the world that underwrites pagan religion” not by advocating “philosophically superior notions” of deity but by presenting a “biblically funded doctrine of ho theos as the transcendent Creator of the cosmos” (36).


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