Today’s iconoclasts seek little more than a photo in the newspaper, feeding their narcissistic love of the image of themselves performing destruction.
In the historical struggle over images—iconomachy (Eikonomachía)—there is no doubt that in the Christian West the iconophiles were victorious. That said, Byzantine defenders of holy representation could not possibly have foreseen how, and to what extent, the eikon would lose its moorings. The complexities involved in worship, the fear of slippage between revering what the icon represents and worshipping the icon itself, are, to us, largely a distant debate. Deluged by icons and images of all kinds, our era is without distinction and without judgement. The separation between the holy and profane, let alone the quality of our attention, is eroded to the point of absurdity. Conditioned to respond with numbness and indifference, if only to protect ourselves—of course I can cope with pornography, horror, and whatever demonic amalgams AI throws up!—our own capacity to imagine is stuffed full of outside, and largely hostile, effigies. The era of total, infinite secular representation is upon us—yet the deeper anthropological (and religious) question of how humanity should understand and treat images has never left us. Nor have the periodic, spasmodic desires to destroy them.
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