Idol Speculation – 4

Eighth Century and Twenty First Century

The arguments hammered out in the Eighth century in Greece are still relevant today. The three “M’s” haven’t died out. There is a trend in both Catholic and Protestant circles to de-emphasize the physical reality of Jesus’ life like the Monophysites did. People may not formally teach that Jesus was not fully human, but they behave like that’s what they believe. They treat Jesus like Superman—a character who looks like a man, but who is really an alien creature with super powers. Others treat Jesus like a squeaky clean miracle working All American boy or they treat him like a radiant God who never really dirtied his feet. Sometimes this tendency portrays Jesus as an otherworldly, poetic, intellectual—a sublime spiritual teacher who was above ordinary passions.

The tendency to de-emphasize Jesus’ physical nature is often combined with a practical kind of Manichean approach to life. When this happens people consider the physical world to be inferior or even sinful. Christians who fall into this error sometimes become obsessively tidy, and consider sexual sins as the only real sin. Their worship becomes overly intellectual or overly ‘spiritual’ with long prayers and academic study. Another form of this fault is excessive tastefulness in religion. Some people have such lofty taste that only the finest architecture will do. Only the most sublime music and liturgy are satisfactory, and they look down their nose at “crude” statues and “common” religious imagery. In fact these spiritual snobs are really looking down on the whole ordinary physical world as being inferior to the intellectual, artistic and spiritual.

At the same time the religion of Islam is still surging forward more strongly than ever. Liked with the other two “M’s” Mohammedism teaches the sinfulness of religious images. It does so because it cannot comprehend that any image of the Lord might be possible. Unlike the other two “M’s” Mohammedism specifically repudiates the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and in doing so, reveals what is actually hidden in the anti-physical approach of Manichaenism and the heresy of Monophysitism.

Taste, Tackiness and True Worship

In the place of these iconoclastic views, Catholics should be unapologetic about our use of images and physical things in worship. The fact that we worship the Lord using physical things is nothing to be ashamed of. God has not created us as purely spiritual beings. We humans are these strange, wonderful and contradictory hybrids of mud and spirit—we are incarnate souls. God gave us bodies to glory in them. The fact that we are physical and spiritual is part of our glory. In fact, there is an old legend that the devil was jealous of Adam because God had made him both spiritual and physical, while the devil, as a fallen angel, was only spiritual.

The fact of the matter is, God gave us physical bodies, and just as a bride says to her husband, ‘With my body I honor thee.’ So we say to our bridegroom, Jesus Christ, “With my body I honor thee.” We honor him when we smell the incense and flowers. We honor him when we see the beauty of magnificent architecture and the tender beauty of a masterwork of sculpture, painting, tapestry or stained glass. We honor him with our ears when we hear the glorious strains of hymn and psalms and spiritual songs. We honor him with our voices as we sing and we honor him with our bodies and as we genuflect or kneel in prayer.

When we venerate an image of Jesus, Mary or the saints in our devotions we are honoring them, but we are also praising the God for the fact that through their physical lives, his glory is revealed. When we use physical images in our worship we are praising God for the physical and glorying in the fact that in Jesus Christ,”the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father…and from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace.