Christ's Body versus Christ's Image

The Iconoclasm of Epiphanius of Salamis

Images are nowhere; images are guilty of nothing.

— Marie-José Mondzain, L'Image naturelle

In his "Letter to John, Bishop of Jerusalem," dating to 394, Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, provides a detailed account of his attack on an image of Christ (or a saint) in a little church in Bethel in John's diocese. The destroyed image was embroidered on a door curtain, such as were common around the time. This ostentatious act of iconoclasm struck the witnesses as so scandalous that the incident soon acquired notoriety, and Epiphanius felt pressed to account for his actions at length:

Moreover, I have heard that certain persons have this grievance against me: When I accompanied you to the holy place called Bethel, there to join you in celebrating the Collect, after the use of the Church, I came to a villa called Anablatha and, as I was passing, saw a lamp burning there. Asking what place it was, and learning it to be a church, I went in to pray, and found there a curtain hanging on the doors of the said church, dyed and embroidered. It bore an image either of Christ or of one of the saints; I do not rightly remember whose the image was.

Seeing this, and being loath that an image of a man should be hung up in Christ's church contrary to the teaching of the Scripture, I tore it asunder and advised the custodians of the place to use it as a winding sheet for some poor person. They, however, murmured, and said that if I made up my mind to tear it, it was only fair that I should give them another curtain in its place. As soon as I heard this, I promised that I would give one, and said that I would send it at once.

Since then there has been some little delay, due to the fact that I have been seeking a curtain of the best quality to give to them instead of the former one, and thought it right to send to Cyprus for one. I have now sent the best that I could find, and I beg that you will order the presbyter of the place to take the curtain which I have sent from the hands of the Reader, and that you will afterwards give directions that curtains of the other sort — opposed as they are to our religion — shall not be hung up in any church of Christ.

A man of your uprightness should be careful to remove an occasion of offence unworthy alike of the Church of Christ and of those Christians who are committed to your charge. (Epiphanius, "Letter from Epiphanius to John," 9)

A strange episode, with the "murmur" of the custodians and the need of explaining to John in detail the incident with a torn curtain. Epiphanius's loathing of "an image of a man" in the church was indeed not at all a self-evident affair, but strikingly at odds with the sensibility of the time. His uncertainty whether the image was that of Christ or a saint suggests that the image in the villa Anablatha could be similar to the popular Coptic hangings, featuring a big colorful halo around a human face, and thus rather abstract and decorative in nature. (See fig. 1.1.)

Figurative images of an ornamental kind were common in Christian everyday life by the end of the fourth century A.D. They often appeared on embroidered textiles, in mosaics on the floors, in carvings on vases or sarcophagi, or as illuminations in books. Their usage did not amount to an image cult. In fact, there is no recorded testimony of Christian image worship in this period. The veneration of icons, as we know it from Byzantium, was based on the theological doctrine of the Holy Image. Not in existence yet at Epiphanius's time, this concept would take centuries to develop. The cult of the Christian image, and especially the cult of the Christ image, is recorded not earlier than the second half of the sixth century.

Besides the "Letter to John" describing his iconoclastic outburst, Epiphanius composed other epistles against image worship, which have been transmitted to us only in scarce and fragmented quotations dispersed through the conciliar acta of the Byzantine image controversy, particularly through the anti-iconoclastic writings of Patriarch Nicephorus (818–820). Epiphanius vocally appealed to Emperor Theodosius I, to the Christian communities in Cyprus and Palestine, and to higher clergy. The geographical expanse of his communications and the hierarchical range of his addressees suggest a goal no less ambitious than introducing iconoclasm as official state policy in the whole of the Roman Empire.

Since their first discovery and publication in 1916, the iconoclastic fragments of Epiphanius have been difficult to reconcile with the known religious practices of the fourth century. Therefore after an initial controversy about their authenticity, they were shelved as a mere cultural curiosity. Thus Epiphanius's iconoclasm with its theological untimeliness is a typical instance of "iconoclash," the term proposed by Bruno Latour for those historical cases of image controversy which lack a clearly motivated project of destruction, cases "when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive."

Epiphanius carried out his iconoclastic argument in polemical letters, fiery appeals, and concrete actions — that is, politically and rhetorically, not philosophically. The particulars of his rhetoric and performance indicate that his alleged fight against Christian image worship was not a matter of doctrinaire polemics but a strategy of discursive practice invented for the need of the day. The iconoclash of Epiphanius's writings calls for a nontheological approach asking: "What, in all this, was the torn curtain of Anablatha?"

Epiphanius's narration of the iconoclastic incident is remarkably unapologetic. Rather, he turns the tables and presents himself as the offended party. His account of events is dramatic: after celebrating a Collect, the big official mass, together with his fellow bishop of Jerusalem, Epiphanius entered a little, hidden-away church for a private prayer, but — to his shock, as the intensity of his reaction conveys — he found himself face to face with an offensive object — a pictured door curtain — which thwarted his prayer.

Epiphanius's description of his act of loathing of the curtain with an "image of a man" gives a hint at how and why an image in a church could jeopardize the Christian faith: its presence in a house of God turns a prayer into a form of pagan image-worship. Through a complicated maze of meaningful allusions Epiphanius carefully links his proclaimed aversion to a Christian image with the anti-pagan legislation of 392 of Emperor Theodosius.

The pagan theme of the episode is insinuated right away: light lured Epiphanius into the house. The burning of candles was indeed around this time prohibited in Christian churches for its association with pagan worship. Thus Epiphanius intimates that the little church in the villa Anablatha was a compromised space. Its pagan connotation is further strengthened by Epiphanius's exposure of the pictured curtain as a funeral object: after tearing it apart, he says, he advised the church custodians to use the destroyed curtain as a shroud for the burial of a poor person.

The advice is meaningful in its range of allusions. Placing portraits of the dead on winding sheets and coffins was a pagan Egyptian practice. The Roman sarcophagi also were usually adorned with human figures portraying the buried dead. Epiphanius's association of an embroidered image on a door hanging in a little Palestinian church with the funeral portrait in its Egyptian or Roman versions strikes one as deliberate and strategic. His "charitable provision for the poor" metonymically overlaps two types of artifact in the locus: the textile image of Christ should be placed over a corpse and buried because — so the unstated assumption — it is like a funeral portrait, and like a funeral portrait it should be moved to the realm of death. But his advice to turn the pictured curtain into a shroud also puns on Paul's metaphor for the sacrament of baptism: "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Gal. 3:27, Revised Standard Version).

Epiphanius's relegation of the curtain to the dead, his insistence on "taking off Christ" from the body of the church and putting it on a cadaver, hints that this object interferes with the sacrament through which one is incorporated into the living body of Christ, as death interferes with life. The first Christian images emerged indeed from the funerary realm of catacombs and sarcophagi, but at the time they symbolized a prospect of future resurrection. They resisted death.

Epiphanius's portrayal of the church in Anablatha as a space compromised by the pagan veneration of the dead and his treatment of the presumed image of Christ as a dead man who turns the church, the body of Christ, into a tomb instantiate semantic polyvalence in action. The Christians interpreted the Hellenistic Egyptian hybrid god Serapis as a deified dead man. His temple would be destroyed later in the decade.

But the rejection of a "dead man" had also another long and precarious tradition, for the expression "dead man" used to designate among the Christians the images of the emperor. As an example of Christian rebellion against Roman state power at the very beginning of the fourth century, the historian Karl Baus brings up "Fabius, an official in the civil administration and vexillifer of the governor of Mauretania, [who] refused to carry 'pictures of dead men,' that is to say, the standard with the device of the divinized emperors."

This context suggests that the pictured curtain of Anablatha took a blow by proxy. Theodosius I, the emperor who endorsed the Nicene faith as the religious foundation of the empire and launched anti-heretical and antipagan campaigns in the name of orthodoxy, was notorious for his self-aggrandizement in images. But from a position on the eastern periphery, a precarious iconoclastic attack on the imperial image could be justified as a matter of ancient piety: "an image of a man" in Christ's church contradicts the teaching of the scriptures, and is "opposed to our religion."

This rhetorical gesture of rejection, however, had by this time little foundation in historical reality. The biblical prohibition of images Epiphanius refers to had been disregarded already for at least a century even in the Jewish synagogues. Consider the famous frescoes in the third-century synagogue of Dura-Europos. But even if outdated, the adherence to ancient piety still possessed enough ideological currency to excuse eccentric behavior.

Maybe therefore, Epiphanius prefers to inaugurate his iconoclast policy not by way of an argument but by staging a divinely inspired explosion of rage, that is, from the positionality of a righteous speaker. Through a radically subjective acting-out of the ancient biblical truth Epiphanius could intervene into the order of discourse "not in plausible words of wisdom" (1 Cor. 2:4, RSV) and call on John to follow Epiphanius's example and forbid such images in the churches under his supervision.

In the conclusion, Epiphanius seems to duly redress the local grievance by sending a blank curtain as a replacement for the destroyed textile. But the real conflict created here is not between a pictured and a blank curtain, that is, not between representation and non-representation, but between the image of Christ and the body of Christ. Epiphanius presented them as irreconcilable and even mutually exclusive when he expunged the quasi-pagan textile image from the body of the church, as if in an act of exorcism. The torn curtain of Anablatha comes to signal here an iconoclash between two representational systems and their figurations of power.

Who Was Epiphanius?

The life of Epiphanius (ca. 315–402) falls into the century of the church's formation as a powerful institution. In the course of this formation, its administrative structures had been progressively fusing and competing withthose of the Roman state. According to his Vita, Epiphanius was a converted Jew and the son of a tenant farmer in Palestine. He started his ecclesiastical career as a monk in the Egyptian desert and Gaza. The fourth-century revival of the monastic movement in the eastern provinces of the empire (Syria, Egypt, and Palestine, the traditional centers of biblical history and ancient Christianity) is regarded today as the first expression of ecclesiastical criticism aimed at the church's officialdom in Rome.

The early phase of fourth-century monasticism was epitomized in the activities of the movement's founding fathers Anthony (died 356) and Pachomius (died 345) in Egypt and Hilarion (died 371) in Gaza. Epiphanius entertained close relations with Hilarion and was, most likely, acquainted with the others. By the middle of the fourth century the concentration of a "true," uncompromising faith represented by monasticism on the periphery of the empire began to prevail over mainstream Christianity in the imperial centers. Remarkably, already in the monastic period Epiphanius adhered to the Athanasian theology of the consubstantiality of Father and Son, when the majority of eastern bishops still supported Arian views subordinating the Son to the Father.

Epiphanius's stringent adherence to Athanasian orthodoxy made his reputation in religious history. But the church historian John Gager helps throw into relief its important political aspect. Gager called for social interpretation of Christian dogmas in terms of the body symbolism developed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). In her studies of the anthropological tendency to use the human body as an image of society, Douglas observed that the body–spirit dichotomy usually comes to deliver statements about the relation of society to the individual, where the body represents society and the spirit stands for the individual.

In applying Douglas's framework to the Christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries, Gager showed that doctrinal positions that valued the spirit over the body did indeed signal a tendency of critical revolt and a desire to separate from the prevalent social-political norms and institutions, whereas any symbolism declaring the unity of body and spirit conveyed a tendency to integration.

Consequently, the "spiritual" body-concept of the Arian theology favored by the monks in the desert can be seen as a reflection of the politically separatist aspiration of monasticism. It sought religious purity and, hence, a distance from the corrupting influences of the imperial centers. By contrast, the Athanasian theology of consubstantiality, which mingled spirit and matter and saw spirit as working through matter, implies a politically integrationalist stance on the tension between church and state.

Epiphanius, who started his career as a monk but then swiftly rose in the official hierarchy to the status of the bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, displayed the same ambiguity of status as Athanasius, the "urbane bishop andtheological controversialist, on the one hand, and fervent admirer of Anthony and frequent visitor to the desert, on the other." Epiphanius's position might seem paradoxical in its embrace of both the monastic critical differentiation from the "secular church" in Rome and the implicit Athanasian tendency toward an affirmative integration with the state through orthodoxy.

But Gager's approach helps reconcile Epiphanius's theology with his ecclesiastical transformation from monk into bishop. The fact that Epiphanius never belonged to any radical, ascetic wing of monasticism suggests that his early separatist tendency was rather moderate. Moreover, the monastic period of his career testifies to his early preference for the Athanasian version of Christian teaching that had the greatest potential of most effectively advancing the political interests of the church. By the end of the century, Epiphanius was one of the first monk-bishops to have risen to a position of considerable influence by imbuing his ecclesiastical leadership with monastic authority.

The monasticism and orthodoxy of Epiphanius, taken together in their tension, betray his ecclesiastical attitude throughout his life as one of competition with the state. He welcomed integration of the church with the empire as a temporary compromise and a vehicle toward the ecclesiastical takeover. On achieving a high clerical position, Epiphanius finally got a chance to put into practice the critical legacy of monasticism.

In his capacity as a bishop he was entitled to make the most of orthodoxy's increasing influence on the Roman state and to endorse the prophecies of the scriptures regarding the providential history of the church in an official ecclesiastical forum. Moreover, he could do so by advantageously relying on his authority as a former monk, that is, a representative of "authentic," uncompromising faith. This authority aided Epiphanius's rise to ecclesiastical prominence in the reign of Emperor Theodosius I (379–395), who integrated the Nicene Creed into state legislation at the Council of Constantinople in 381.