‘Iconoclash’ of Civilizations: Missives From the Image Wars
Here’s an “in case you missed it” recommended long read on changing tones in the US in regards to religion.
Somewhere on the lower level of the Cloisters in New York is a small but striking 16th century stained-glass windowpane that depicts a robed monk casting a bound book into a burning pile of wood and manuscripts. A scroll, blown by the wind, not yet consumed, reaches out of the flames and displays a line from Sextus Propertius’s Elegies. “Olim gratus eram,” I was once acceptable. Since first coming across this pane, I’ve often wondered what the people who made it thought upon beholding it. Were they celebrating or mourning the scene depicted? Or perhaps it was something in between?
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In a New Yorker essay after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Teju Cole invoked Menocchio, the 16th century miller who is the hero of Carlo Ginzburg’s groundbreaking micro-history, The Cheese and the Worms. Cole uses Menocchio to show that intolerance, iconoclastic intolerance, is definitional to the formation of The West; the anecdote serves to show that this intolerance has always been present and cannot be gotten rid of. Cole comes to the conclusion that:
The West is a variegated space, in which both freedom of thought and tightly regulated speech exist, and in which disavowals of deadly violence happen at the same time as clandestine torture. But, at moments when Western societies consider themselves under attack, the discourse is quickly dominated by an ahistorical fantasy of long-suffering serenity and fortitude in the face of provocation. Yet European and American history are so strongly marked by efforts to control speech that the persecution of rebellious thought must be considered among the foundational buttresses of these societies. Witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas extended into American history and took on American modes, from the breaking of slaves to the censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
This is obvious from the ending of Menocchio’s account: he, like the books in the stained glass from the same era at the Cloisters, is burned at the stake.
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