Heresy and Hammer: How Protestant Iconoclasm Became a Campaign of Destruction

And an introduction to Roger Scruton on Beauty

St. James St. Andrew’s church, North Burlingham, “the last medieval roodscreen in East Anglia, and one of the last in England. It is dated 1536, by which date it must already have seemed a defiant statement. As if in response, the faces of the Saints have been excised more violently than any others in East Anglia, by the cruel, puritan hands of Edward VI's Taleban.”

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Thanks to Alert Reader Andrew M, for the correction for the image above. St. Andrew’s church, not St. James.

Also, I forgot to put this little video in, by Dr. Allan Barton whose work looking at English medieval sacred art I very much enjoy. Definitely recommend his website, The Antiquary.

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Throughout Christian history, three significant periods of iconoclasm have reshaped the landscape of religious art and worship - it’s the evil that won’t go away, and every time it’s been grounded in exactly the same set of fundamental philosophical and theological errors. The First Byzantine Iconoclasm (c. 720s–787) the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm, (814 - 842) tracks perfectly with the Protestant Reformation’s iconoclastic movements in Western Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Though separated by many centuries their common threads are easily recognisable: Docetism, Gnosticism, Materialism and consequent anti-sacramentality. In simplest terms, the 16th century Protestant “reformers” were simply digging up and repackaging ancient Christological heresies that had been resolved definitively for centuries. The Protestants’ 3rd Iconoclasm, the waves of crude vandalism by whipped up mobs, resulted in the ripping out of every trace of beauty of images across large parts of Europe, the scraping of our churches bare, down to the stone.

The urge of all ideologues to erase memory of the deep past, the connections to our cultural ancestors, will never die. This wicked drive to sever ties with tradition, always under the guise of progress or purification, mirrors the ancient impulse behind the first two frenzies of iconoclasm: an attempt to reshape reality by removing the symbols and artifacts that anchor us to a richer, more complex world. It is an attempt, in essence, to replace God’s reality with something less wild, more controllable, more human and tame.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Orwell

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In today’s post for paid subscribers, we will investigate the philosophical and theological threads that connected these acts of vandalism with their precursors in the 8th and 9th centuries. When pulled, this thread links Protestant errors about the Incarnation and the material world - their rejection of Sacramentality - not only with the ancient Christological heresies but with later Jewish and Islamic fellow travellers.

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In honour St. Michael and all Archangels, I thought I’d feature a little gift item from my shop, a blank notebook printed on the cover with that incredible scene of the Last Judgment with St. Michael weighing the souls of those who rise from the grave. The painting is by the great Gothic Flemish painter, Hans Memling.

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