icon theology
Iconoclasm occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning not merely as a historical episode in Byzantine or Reformation Christianity but as a perennial psychic gesture — the recurring impulse to destroy the image in the name of a purer, more abstract, or more rational principle. Jung identifies the Reformation’s iconoclasm as a rupture in the ‘protective wall of sacred images,’ unleashing a progressive disenchantment whose psychological consequences persist into modernity. Hillman extends this diagnosis most systematically, reading iconoclasm as the structural opponent of imaginal psychology: wherever the literalist, monotheistic, or rationalist mentality encounters the image it perceives a threat, and its response is destruction. For Hillman, the battles at Nicaea in 787 are not ecclesiastical curiosities but the founding moment of a conflict between ‘a literalist theology of spirit and an imaginational psychology’ — a conflict that resurfaces in Jaspers’s attack on demonology and in contemporary censorship of images. McGilchrist situates iconoclasm within his hemispheric thesis, reading the Reformation’s assault on sacred pictures as the left hemisphere’s subordination of metaphorical understanding to verbal proclamation. Corbin’s mystical tradition holds iconoclasm and idolatry as twin errors flanking the genuine theophanic image. John of Damascus provides the primary counter-argument: matter, sanctified by incarnation, becomes a vehicle of grace, and to destroy the image is to attack the archetype. Across these voices runs a shared conviction that the stakes of iconoclasm are not aesthetic but ontological — and ultimately psychological.
the principal fight was between a literalist theology of spirit and an imaginational psychology… The iconoclasts saw an image as consubstantial in all aspects with its archetype.
Hillman frames the historical iconoclast controversy as the founding conflict between abstract spirit-theology and depth-psychological imaginal thinking, with the iconoclasts literalizing the image-archetype relation they sought to deny.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
The iconoclasm of the Reformation, however, quite literally made a breach in the protective wall of sacred images, and since then one image after another has crumbled away.
Jung identifies Reformation iconoclasm as the decisive historical rupture that dismantled the symbolic order protecting the collective psyche, inaugurating the modern crisis of meaning.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
Jaspers’ connection of demonology with images is a recurrence of iconoclasm. Jung’s experiential turn to images is the recurrence of the imagist gesture.
Hillman maps modern intellectual history onto the ancient iconoclast controversy, reading Jaspers as iconoclast and Jung as imagist, demonstrating that the conflict is structurally perpetual.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
intolerance of images is also an intolerance of the imagination and results from a lost imagination… Cromwell’s men acted out the new literalism that was losing touch with metaphorical imagination.
Hillman argues that iconoclasm is the outward expression of an internal psychological impoverishment — the loss of metaphorical imagination — and that smashing images is simultaneously smashing the capacity for personifying.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
The war against pornography is only obliquely motivated by the pious defense of hapless children… The war is that ancient one of iconoclasm ag[ainst the image].
Hillman identifies contemporary anti-pornography campaigns as a modern recurrence of the ancient iconoclastic impulse, revealing iconoclasm as a transhistorical psychological structure rather than a bounded theological event.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
‘Image-breakers ceaselessly say that images cannot speak’: their failing is their silence. They do not use words… the triumph of language… a concrete expression of the triumph of language.
McGilchrist interprets Reformation iconoclasm as the left hemisphere’s suppression of metaphorical, non-verbal modes of meaning in favor of verbal proclamation, aligning it with his hemispheric asymmetry thesis.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
it was metaphorical understanding – that came before the tribunal, was arraigned and executed. So it was, too, in the age of the Enlightenment, where it was not wooden saints, but kings and dukes that were decapitated.
McGilchrist argues that iconoclasm is the execution of metaphorical understanding itself, and draws a structural parallel between Reformation image-breaking and Enlightenment political violence.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Now let us go behind Jung and Jaspers, far behind, to Nicaea in the Autumn of the year 787 and the last full ecumenical council where some three hundred Bishops… gathered in Byzantine Bythnia.
Hillman establishes the Council of Nicaea II (787) as the historical origin point for the depth-psychological debate over images, positioning it as background to both Jung’s and Jaspers’s modern stances.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
the significance of theophanies is to be found neither in literalism… nor in allegorism… any more than it is to be found in tashbīh or ta’ṭīl, idolatry or iconoclasm.
Corbin positions iconoclasm alongside idolatry as twin reductive errors that destroy the theophanic image, arguing that the Islamic mystical tradition maintains itself on a dialectical ridge between both extremes.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
‘I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit’, wrote Erasmus, ‘the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity.’
McGilchrist uses Erasmus’s testimony about Reformation iconoclastic fanaticism to illustrate how reforming impulses generate uncontrollable destructive forces — a pattern he also discerns in Heidegger’s philosophical reception.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
by 820 the iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim… icons held them in a sense of mystery… Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable of the arts.
Armstrong documents the defeat of Byzantine iconoclasm and the apophatic theology that validated the icon as a vehicle of ineffable mystery, providing historical grounding for depth-psychology’s defense of the image.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
This move returns us not only to Kant and Protestant iconoclasm, but to the spiritual preference for abstraction — Truth, Beauty, God — as more important, more universal, more eternal than concrete psychological imagination.
Hillman links Protestant iconoclasm to Kantian abstraction, identifying a continuous philosophical preference for the universal over the imaginal that evacuates concrete psychological imagination.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
I would see interesting parallels with the Reformation, the last time there was a major assault on art, though its target then was somewhat different: not ‘the beautiful’, but ‘the holy’.
McGilchrist draws a structural parallel between Reformation iconoclasm’s assault on the holy and modernity’s assault on beauty, positioning both as expressions of the left hemisphere’s hostility to reverential, metaphorical engagement.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
For orthodox monotheists who follow a pure and abstract spirit, any image depraves and corrupts, eve[n the most ordinary].
Hillman identifies monotheistic abstraction as the psychological root of iconoclasm, arguing that any image is experienced as corrupting by a psychology committed to a non-imaginal, purely spiritual absolute.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
the religious sign is not simply an instrument of thought… its intention is always also to establish a true means of communication with this power and to really introduce its presence into the human world.
Vernant’s analysis of the Greek religious image as a genuine medium of divine presence — not mere representation — provides anthropological grounding for the depth-psychological defense of the image against iconoclastic reduction.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
this paradoxical aspiration exists in order to inscribe absence in presence, to insert the other, the elsewhere, into our familiar universe.
Vernant articulates the fundamental ontological function of the religious image — making the invisible visible — against which iconoclasm’s destruction can be understood as a refusal of this liminal, mediating function.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
It is not matter which I adore; it is the Lord of matter, becoming matter for my sake, taking up His abode in matter and working out my salvation through matter.
John of Damascus articulates the principal theological counter-argument to iconoclasm: incarnation sacralizes matter as a channel of divine grace, making image-veneration not idolatry but a consequence of the logic of the Incarnation.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
if it be in very deed for the glory of God and of His saints… we should receive and honour and worship them as images, and remembrances, likenesses, and the books of the illiterate.
John of Damascus defends images as legitimate aids to devotion contingent upon right intention, directly countering iconoclast arguments by appeal to the communicative and anagogical function of the image.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
We are still in search of reconstituting that third place, the intermediate realm of psyche — that is also the realm of images and the power of imagination — from which we were exiled by theological, spiritual men more than a thousand years ago.
Hillman situates iconoclasm within a longer theological suppression of the imaginal realm, identifying the exile of psyche’s image-world as the root pathology of Western psychological culture.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside
What the right hemisphere had understood intuitively, being comfortable with metaphoric meaning, was forced into the straightjacket of legalistic thinking.
McGilchrist analyzes the Reformation eucharistic controversy as a symptom of the same left-hemisphere literalism that drives iconoclasm, showing the two phenomena as expressions of a single cognitive pathology.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside