Concept

Aniconism in Christianity

Aniconism is the absence of material representations of the natural and supernatural world in various cultures, particularly in the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Most denominations of Christianity have not generally practiced aniconism, or the avoidance or prohibition of types of images, even dating back to early Christian art and architecture. Those in the faith have generally had an active tradition of making artwork and Christian media depicting God, religious figures, and other aspects of theology. There have however been periods of aniconism in Christian history, notably during the controversy of the Byzantine iconoclasm of the eighth century, and following the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, when Calvinism in particular rejected all images in churches, and this practice continues today in some Reformed (Calvinist) churches, as well as some forms of fundamentalist Christianity. The Catholic Church has always defended the use of sacred images in churches, shrines, and homes, encouraging their veneration but condemning anyone who would worship them as if they were gods themselves. The use of religious icons and images continues to be advocated at the highest level by religious leaders of major Christian denominations such as some Lutherans, Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics. The veneration of icons is also a key element of the doxology of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church accept the church council which condemned iconoclasm and mandated the use of sacred images, the icons of saints, and the crucifix in churches, public shrines, and in homes. The explanation of the consistency of sacred images with the Christian religion was largely based on the arguments of St. John Damascene. Modern Anglicanism contains both schools of thought – aniconism and iconodulism.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related publications (4)

Private and Secure Distributed Learning

Georgios Damaskinos

The ever-growing number of edge devices (e.g., smartphones) and the exploding volume of sensitive data they produce, call for distributed machine learning techniques that are privacy-preserving. Given the increasing computing capabilities of modern edge de ...
EPFL2020

Asynchronous Byzantine Machine Learning (the case of SGD)

Rachid Guerraoui, Mahsa Taziki, El Mahdi El Mhamdi, Rhicheek Patra, Georgios Damaskinos

Asynchronous distributed machine learning solutions have proven very effective so far, but always assuming perfectly functioning workers. In practice, some of the workers can however exhibit Byzantine behavior, caused by hardware failures, software bugs, c ...
2018

Names Trump Malice: Tiny Mobile Agents Can Tolerate Byzantine Failures

Rachid Guerraoui, Eric Ruppert

We introduce a new theoretical model of ad hoc mobile computing in which agents have severely restricted memory, highly unpredictable movement and no initial knowledge of the system. Each agent’s memory can store O(1) bits, plus a unique identifier, and O(1 ...
2009
Show more
Related concepts (16)
Byzantine Iconoclasm
The Byzantine Iconoclasm (Eikonomachía) were two periods in the history of the Byzantine Empire when the use of s or icons was opposed by religious and imperial authorities within the Ecumenical Patriarchate (at the time still comprising the Roman-Latin and the Eastern-Orthodox traditions) and the temporal imperial hierarchy. The First Iconoclasm, as it is sometimes called, occurred between about 726 and 787, while the Second Iconoclasm occurred between 814 and 842.
Aniconism
Aniconism is the absence of artistic representations (icons) of the natural and supernatural worlds, or it is the absence of representations of certain figures in religions. It is a feature of various cultures, particularly of cultures which are based on monotheistic Abrahamic religions. The prohibition of material representations may only extend from God and other supernatural beings to saint-like characters, or it may extend to material representations of all living beings, and material representations of everything that exists.
Christian art
Christian art is sacred art which uses subjects, themes, and imagery from Christianity. Most Christian groups use or have used art to some extent, including early Christian art and architecture and Christian media. Images of Jesus and narrative scenes from the Life of Christ are the most common subjects, and scenes from the Old Testament play a part in the art of most denominations. Images of the Virgin Mary and saints are much rarer in Protestant art than that of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.