Their Iconoclasm and Our Idolatry

By Crispin Sartwell

And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it into powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it. And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them?

Exodus 32

What the Taliban is doing to statues in Afghanistan appears to be mindless destruction. But it is deeply rooted in a tradition we share with them.

The word "iconoclast" today indicates a person who attacks widely accepted beliefs. But it originally meant one who literally breaks idols. And the first iconoclast on the record was Moses, who, coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments to find the Israelites worshiping a statue, broke the tablets and then the idol itself.

Ever since, we have oscillated between idolatry and iconoclasm, two impulses that share a belief that images have power: power to bring you to the divine, or to mislead you into worshiping false gods.

Plato wanted to ban figurative art because he believed it was deceptive. The early Christians destroyed images of the Roman and Greek gods throughout the Roman Empire, and Christian missionaries have done the same with images all over the world. The Protestant Reformation of Luther and Calvin was in part a reaction against the Catholic cult of Mary and the saints, and the Protestants destroyed innumerable Catholic icons.

The Mosaic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all of which recognize the authority of the Old Testament and its prohibition of idol worship, have each given birth to extreme moments of iconoclasm. Sects of Judaism and Islam in particular have sometimes gone as far as Plato and prohibited all representational arts.

Iconoclasm is inseparable from monotheism. God for the Mosaic religions is conceived as pure spirit, and hence often as an entity of which there can be no images. That is part of what distinguishes the Mosaic religions from what monotheists call paganism and idolatry.

That is not to say that what the Taliban is doing is rational or justified. Afghanistan, in losing its images of the Buddha and other statues, is losing something that connects them and us to their history, and is losing the work of centuries of creative genius. But we must also acknowledge that the Taliban''s interpretation of Islam is directly connected to the mainstream of the tradition of Moses.

But the idolaters that the Taliban are attacking are not the worshipers of the Golden Calf or even of the Buddha. Buddhism has been dead in Afghanistan for a thousand years.

The idols they''re obliterating are ours.

We of the secular West have to some degree replaced religion with art. Art for us is something holy that must be preserved: housed in fortress-like buildings to which we make pilgrimages, preserved or restored in perpetuity. Art has not always been thought of that way by other cultures. Navajo sand paintings, as beautiful and difficult to make as they are, are traditionally destroyed after the ceremonies for which they are made.

Art for us is spiritual, eternal, transcendent. We have made of art a cult and the work of art is our idol. So the iconoclasts of the modern era horrify us as much as the iconoclasts of the ancient world horrified the pagans. It has seemed at times in the last few days that we are moved more by the plight of the sculptures of Afghanistan than the plight of the Afghan people who are suffering from a drought and from the oppression of the Taliban rulers themselves.

But the Taliban know very well how to horrify us: they know our religion, and they know their own. They''re both enacting a central feature of theirs, and achieving maximum provocation by assaulting ours.

This leads to the sad destruction of beautiful things. But it also testifies to the continuing power of images and the continuing power of the great religious traditions.

And give the Taliban this: unlike Moses with the Israelites, they''re not, as far as we know, grinding the statues to powder, strawing them upon the waters, and making people drink of them.

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