Cartoon controversy: breaking the images -Feb 11, 2006
"How did Britain - home to the iconoclasm of Milton, Marx and the Sex Pistols - allow book-burning and fatwas to be decreed openly, in the streets of south Yorkshire?" asked Tristram Hunt in the New Statesman last year. Interesting thing to ask. How come it's Milton, Marx and the Sex Pistols that get to be cast as the iconoclasts? After all, it's the Abrahamic faiths that invented iconoclasm. And it's the Islamic prohibition against images of the prophet that prompted the latest furore over these cartoons. It's Muslims and Jews who are surely the real iconoclasts.

Secular commentators have conceived this whole cartoon row as a debate about the limits of free speech. From the perspective of the Hebrew Bible, that would be to regard the issue in terms of the third of the 10 commandments: "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the lord your God." That is, the cartoons are a form of blasphemy.

On the other hand, iconoclasm - from the Greek eikon, image, and klaein, to break - finds its origins in the very different second commandment: "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above or the earth beneath." Because God is so utterly inscrutable, all representations of the divine are futile. We can never know what God looks like. There can never be anything like a theological Madame Tussauds. Moreover, any attempt to depict the divine is recognised as an attempt to control it, to collapse it within the dimensions of human wit, to requisition it as support for one particular way of making sense of the world. The destruction of images isn't cultural vandalism; it's a warning against making the divine a puppet of human aspiration.

As Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the 10 commandments he is depicted as journeying ever closer to God. Yet the higher he climbs, the more mist and darkness envelops him. Mystical writers called it the cloud of unknowing. God dwells in "unapproachable light". In contrast, those at the foot of the mountain are casting the golden calf, a precise depiction of just what they reckon God to be like. It's the sort of God that will stand still and look the part as religious rituals are spun around it. And because this representation has been fabricated according to human expectation, it will always look more like God than God does. The danger with idolatry is that it produces clear-eyed believers, convinced they're right and convinced they know what God is asking of them. Iconoclasm is the sometimes comic, sometimes violent insistence that we must be modest in out knowledge of the divine. Yet to unquestioning believers themselves, iconoclasm is easily confused with an attack upon God.

Most image destruction has been within the Christian tradition, only because Christians have disagreed about representation in a way that Jews and Muslims have not. Christian art began slowly, with even St Augustine asserting "God should be worshipped without an image". Others argued that because God had became human in the person of Jesus, Christians are provided with an assured image of the invisible God, therefore Christian representational art is fully justified. It's an argument that has waged its way through the centuries: images created and images smashed. It exploded in the eighth century and again at the Reformation.

Again and again, theologians have warned against uncritical subordination to representations of God, power or authority. That's the unlikely link between the iconoclasm of Milton, Marx and the Sex Pistols and that of the Judeo-Islamic tradition. And it's why a condemnation of the Danish cartoonists by those within other Abrahamic faiths, acting in solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters, is not quite so straightforward. A faith tradition that is never offended is one that is never challenged to give itself the necessary critical scrutiny. Indeed, the tendency to create dangerous idols of the divine is primarily a sin of the religious, not a blasphemy of the irreligious.