No sooner had I finished reading the first chunk of St. John Damascene’s “On Holy Images” (for the regular Wednesday chunk of the Church Fathers on my Wednesday Maria Lectrix podcasts — which I’ll be posting tonight) than Mike Aquilina posted that Scott Hahn has written a whole article about the Iconoclasts over on Beliefnet!
My favorite bit so far is when he points out that God commands images be made and kept in many cases — particularly “the written image in books”. Yes, if you ban all images you ban the Bible, because all written language is merely a recorded image of words, not the words themselves! (And so are all broadcast and recording mediums, so don’t be making propaganda videos, either.) He says a lot of other stuff, too (the Incarnation thing, of course, but I’m particularly fond of the point that all of Creation is full of images of God made by God — most notably, us). But the short version is that to get rid of all images is to be “out of harmony with God”, not to obey Him.
You can read the whole book in the Allies translation over on the Internet Archive, or you can read an HTML-ed version on CCEL (without Allies’ name, for some reason) or at the Medieval Sourcebook. It’ll take me a while to read this sucker on the podcast, so you might as well.
Aliens in This World 