The Philosophy of Icons

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.034

Chapter 33 - The Philosophy of Icons

from Part VI - THE GREEK CHRISTIAN PLATONIST TRADITION FROM THE CAPPADOCIANS TO MAXIMUS AND ERIUGENA

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

A. H. Armstrong

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The Natural Image

It was said at the outset that Platonism and Christianism adopted different attitudes towards corporeal nature, the one regarding it as an obstacle to the soul's perfection, the other as an aid, and itself perfectible. The statement requires modification on both sides. Plato in his later works taught that the sensible world, being a copy of the intelligible, was a guide to the understanding of it, and his successors, under the influence of the Asiatic cults, adopted the same attitude to man-made images; while the early Christians, inheriting the Jewish abhorrence of idolatry, regarded as sacrilegious the representation of spiritual things through the medium of matter. Paganism and Christianism reacted to the same stimulus in contrary ways: the pagan cults which infected Platonism with theurgy stiffened the resistance of the Christians and turned their monotheism, for a time, into iconoclasm.

In the sensible world natural images are distinguished from artificial images by their causes. The causes of the former are the Forms: ‘ The Idea’, says Xenocrates, ‘is the exemplary cause of things which subsist naturally (κατα φυσιν).’ The causes of the latter are concepts in the mind of the artist: ‘Every artist possesses wholly the paradeigma in himself, and confers its shape upon matter.’ But if the Forms are themselves concepts in the Divine Mind, then both kinds of cause are concepts or thoughts, and the difference lies in the thinker, in the one case divine, in the other human.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , pp. 506 - 517

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.034 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1967

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