Annotatio CCXLVII

”We do not worship thy gods, and the statue which thou hast set up we do not adore.” — Daniel 3:18

Jerome, for the elucidation of this clause, uses these words:¹ “The worshippers of God ought not to adore images: therefore let the judges and princes of the world, who adore the statues and images of the Emperors, understand themselves to do that which the three children, unwilling to do, pleased God. And the property [distinction] is to be noted: they say that God is worshipped, [but] the image adored — which neither [of the two] suits the servants of God.”

Balthasar Hiemairus [Hubmaier] — who, on account of the pertinacity of heresy, was burned at Vienna in the year of the Lord 1528 — in the book which he inscribed against the worshippers of images, abuses these words of Jerome for the protection of his error, a testimony being added after that very [passage] from the epistle of Epiphanius to John, bishop of Jerusalem, translated and approved by Jerome himself, in these words: “When I had come to the villa which is called Anablatha, and, passing by, had seen there a lamp burning, and had asked what place it was, and had learned that it was a Church, and had entered in to pray — I found there a veil hanging in the doors of that same Church, dyed and painted, and having an image as it were of Christ, or of some saint; for I do not sufficiently remember whose the image was. When, therefore, I had seen this — that, in the Church of Christ, against the authority of the Scriptures, the image of a man was hanging — I tore it, and rather gave counsel to the keepers of that place that they should wrap [in it] and carry out some poor dead [person]. But they, murmuring against [me], said: If he wished to tear [it], it was just that he should give another veil, and change [it]. When I had heard this, I promised that I would give [one], and that I would send [it] straightway; but now I have sent what I was able to find, and I pray that thou command the presbyters of that same place to receive

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the veil from the bearer, which has been sent by us; and henceforth [give order] to command, in the Church of Christ, that veils of this sort — which come against our religion — be not hung up: for it becometh thy reverence rather to have this solicitude, that it take away the scrupulosity which is unworthy of the Church of Christ, and of the peoples who are entrusted to thee.”

Again, in another epistle, which is cited in the acts of the seventh synod, the same author thus writes: “Be ye mindful, beloved sons, not to bring images into the Church, nor to place them in the cemeteries of the saints, but always carry God about in your hearts; nay, let them not even be tolerated in a common house: for it is not lawful for a Christian to be held [in suspense] through the eyes, but through the engagement of the mind.” These things Epiphanius; to which the author of the book [Balthasar] annexes the opinion of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea.

He, in the epistle to Constantia Augusta — who was asking from him an image of Christ — so wrote: “Since thou hast written to me concerning an image of Christ, that I should send [it] to thee, I would that thou signify to me which image of Christ thou thinkest [of] — whether that true and incommutable [one], bearing the characters [features] of his nature, or this [one] which, for our sake, he assumed, putting on for us the servile form. But indeed concerning the divine form I do not think that thou thyself art solicitous, since thou hast been taught by him that no one has known the Father except the Son, nor that anyone has worthily known the Son himself, except him who begot him, the Father.” And after other [things]: “But if thou altogether requirest an image of the form, and of the flesh, which for our sake he put on — this too we have learned to be commingled with the glory of his deity, and [to be] passible, and mortal.” And after a few [words]: “Who, therefore, could portray with dead and lifeless colors, and with shadowy painting, the shining and coruscating splendors of glory and of dignity of this sort? — since not even his divine disciples were able to contemplate him on the mountain, [but], falling on their face, confessed that they could not behold a spectacle of this kind. If, therefore, in the figure of his flesh he received such power from the divinity dwelling in it, what must one say [of it] then, when — having put off mortality, and washed away corruption — he transferred the form of a servant into the glory of the Lord and of God? [namely] after the victory of death; after the ascension into the heavens; after being seated with the Father on a royal throne, at the right hand; after rest in the ineffable and unnamable bosoms of the Father — into which, as he ascended and took his seat, the heavenly powers acclaimed him with blessed voices, saying: ‘Princes, lift up your gates; be ye lifted up, O heavenly gates; and the King of glory shall enter in.’”² Thus far Eusebius.

To whom Balthasar subjoins the authority of Ambrose, from the funeral oration on Theodosius, where thus is read: “Helena, therefore, found the cross of the Lord — [and] adored the King, not indeed the wood; because this is a gentile error, and a vanity of the impious: but she adored him who hung on the wood — inscribed in the title of the cross.”

At length, after many explanations of these opinions, he [Balthasar] concludes his narration with two decrees. Of these, that which is the more ancient is contained in canon 36 of the Council of Elvira [Eliberitanum], celebrated in the year of the Lord 320. Its words are these: “It has pleased [us] that pictures ought not to be in the Church, lest that which is worshipped or adored be painted on the walls.” But the other [decree] was published much later, about the year of the Lord 730, under Leo and Constantine his son, Augusti, in the third Ephesine council, published in these words: “If anyone [presume] to figure the figure of the incarnate Word of God, and the ideas of all the saints,” #### “We do not worship thy gods, and the statue which thou hast set up we do not adore.” — Daniel 3:18

(the iconoclast decree concludes:) ”…[if anyone presume to figure the incarnate Word of God, and the ideas of all the saints] in lifeless and mute images, with material colors, since they bring no use at all — let him be anathema. For it is a vain excogitation, and a diabolical invention of insidious plotting.” After the promulgation of which decree, the same Emperors commanded all images and statues to be taken away from the temples, and burned.

By these, and by other testimonies of the Fathers and of the divine Scripture — forcibly wrested, and wrongly expounded — the impious Balthasar strives to demolish the cult of the holy Images. To whom we respond briefly, and as much as the brevity of the present undertaking permits: that he, in the first place, most ineptly accommodates to the venerable images of the saints [those things] which Jerome had written concerning the statue of the king of the Assyrians, and concerning the other images of the gentiles³ — which they placed not only to their gods (that is, to their demons), but also to their kings and princes, living and dead, and impiously adored. These [Jerome] said were not to be adored — not, however, those which we Christians consecrate to the true God, and to his blessed friends and servants. Nor less insipidly does he bring Ambrose into the midst: who, although he says that Helena did not adore the cross, because to adore the wood is a gentile error and vanity, nevertheless does not deny that the cross is to be adored;⁴ whose adoration, a little after the proposed words, he confirms, saying: “Wisely did Helena, who raised the cross upon the head of kings, and placed [it there], that the cross of Christ might be adored in kings. This is not that insolence, but piety, which is paid to the sacred redemption.” And then, some words being interposed, concerning the adoration of the nail by which the feet of our Savior were transfixed, he says: “By the iron of the feet of Christ are kings inclined [bowed] — do kings adore, and do the Photinians deny his divinity? The emperors prefer the nail of his cross to their diadem — and do the Arians diminish his power?” By which sayings Ambrose prudently admonishes that we should not worship the cross with a gentile superstition — that is, thinking that wood to be God, or some numen of deity — but that we should adore it with a pious and Christian cult, as a symbol of human redemption, and a monument of those things which for us our redeemer Christ endured upon it, referring to him whatsoever of honor and reverence we exhibit to his cross. In this order, therefore, and with this scope, we venerate also the other sacred images, according to the formula handed down in the second Nicene synod — which [formula], as Sabellicus, in book 8 of the eighth Ennead, is witness, the Latin Fathers, in the times of Charlemagne, concluded [expressed] in these two verses, translated from the Greek, under a little rill of rhythm’s consonance [i.e., with rhyme], with which that age had then first begun to be delighted:

This is God, which the image teaches — but the image itself is not God; this thou mayest look upon, yet worship with the mind that which thou discernest in it.

(Hoc Deus est, quod imago docet: sed non Deus ipsa. / Hanc videas, sed mente colas quod cernis in ipsa.)

But to that which is opposed from the epistles of Epiphanius, John Damascene, almost eight hundred years ago from now, responded, in the first book against the Iconomastigi [the Image-scourgers], in this manner:⁵ “But if thou objectest that that eminent and admirable Epiphanius openly interdicted the cult of them [images]: first indeed I would respond that that doctrine — related perhaps from a marginal annotation into the text, and so being spurious — did not likewise proceed from his lucubration, [but] is rather of another, who was called by the same name,

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lest [we do] that which many are wont to do. Then, in the second place, if thou opposest [it] — we know that the blessed Athanasius forbade the relics of the saints to be placed in little caskets or coffers, or rather commanded that they be buried in the earth, for this [reason]: because he desired by all means to abrogate the absurd custom of the Egyptians, who did not cover the cadavers of their [dead] with earth, but deposited [them] on beds and biers. Perhaps also Epiphanius, that eminent [man], wishing to recall some such thing to rectitude, provided by law that images should not be painted — that we may also grant it to have been his opinion. For, [seeing] that this was not his purpose, to remove them, the Church, by the testimony of this blessed Epiphanius, is even unto our times adorned in every part with images.⁶ Thirdly I would respond: it is not infrequent, nor rare, [that] some [newly] found thing is a law handed down to the Church; for neither does one swallow make the spring — as it seems to Gregory the Theologian, and to truth itself — nor can one opinion demolish from the foundations the tradition of the whole Church, and pull [it] up from the boundary of the earth even to the extreme limit.” Thus far Damascene.

From whose second response the reason can easily be rendered why the provincial Council of Elvira [Eliberitanum] — held in Spain by only nineteen bishops — forbade images to be painted in the temples of that province:⁷ namely, that it might extinguish idolatry by this remedy. For although the fathers of that synod knew that the cult of the sacred Images confers the greatest utility upon the now-adult [mature] Church, nevertheless, since they had observed that those nations — lately coming to Christ from the superstition of the idols — were still inclined to their former idolatry, and were paying divine honors to the images painted in the churches of the Christians, as if there were in them something of divinity, they judged that the present disease could not otherwise be healed than by the interdiction of images. Accordingly, since now the Christian people is not, as those Spaniards of old were, prone to idolatry, no cause appears why Images should be taken away from the Church; for although one or another, deceived by a certain simplicity, may err in the worshipping of Images, the Images are not, for the sake of those [few], to be altogether abolished, but their simplicity is to be instructed: for laws provide not for the number of the few, but for the greater multitude of the peoples.

Moreover, to the Council of Ephesus, and the edicts of the two Emperors pronounced against the venerable Images, it pleases [me] to respond nothing else than that which the same Damascene, in the second volume of the same work, said: “In the dogmas and dispositions ecclesiastical, it is not for Emperors⁸ to impose laws, but to receive [them]; but to the pastors and doctors of the Church is it committed, that they prescribe the order of the ecclesiastical matter not according to the arbitration of the Emperors, but according to the norm of the right faith — the Apostle saying, ‘In the Church God has placed certain ones: first the Apostles, secondly the Prophets, thirdly the Pastors and Doctors’ [1 Cor 12:28], making no mention of emperors among these. Wherefore those Emperors, who invaded the apostolic and pastoral function, and, a synod being violently forced together in Blachernae near Ephesus, commanded impious canons to be made, according to their [own] lust, by the bishops — deservedly, as robbers and brigands, were they condemned by the Catholics.” And some of the bishops who had been present at that detestable council, afterward repenting, abjured that canon — published against the blessed images — in the presence of three hundred ### ANNOTATIO CCXLVII (concluded)

“We do not worship thy gods, and the statue which thou hast set up we do not adore.” — Daniel 3:18

(the abjuration concludes:) [they abjured that canon] in the presence of three hundred and fifty Fathers, in the second Nicene synod, in whose first action [session] the palinode [recantation] of the penitent bishops is still read. There remains the epistle of Eusebius of Caesarea, to which it is superfluous to respond:⁹ for it is established, from the sixth action of the same synod, that it was reprobated by the common consent of all the Fathers, and — [being] among the impious writings not retracted by its own author — was rejected.