What Is an Image?

T HERE HAVE BEEN times when the question What is an image? was matter of some urgency. In eighthand ninth-century Byzantium, for instance, your answer would have immediately identified you as partisan in the struggle between emperor and patriarch, as radical iconoclast seeking to purify the Church of idolatry, or conservative iconophile seeking to preserve traditional liturgical practices. The conflict over the nature and use of icons, on the surface dispute about fine points in religious ritual and the meaning of symbols, was actually, as Jaroslav Pelikan points out, a social movement in disguise that used doctrinal vocabulary to rationalize an essentially political conflict.' In mid-seventeenth-century England the connection between social movements, political causes, and the nature of imagery was, by contrast, quite undisguised. It is perhaps only slight exaggeration to say that the English Civil War was fought over the question of images, and not just the question of statues and other material symbols in religious ritual, but less tangible matters such as the idol of monarchy and, beyond that, the idols of the mind that Reformation thinkers sought to purge in themselves and others.2