“Do not thump the book of G’Quan. It is disrespectful.” – Ambassador G’Kar, Babylon 5
I like the dual edge of this remark. Fundamentalists and iconoclasts both could take it to heart. I was once present when a guest set a can of Pepsi on an icon. The host, my Bishop, was kinder than I would have been. We both reacted much like G’Kar would though, only on different days. Blood racing, if you don’t know G’Kar.
In another instance, a family member piled my laundry on an icon. I was less charitable than I should have been. After all, she had just folded my laundry. A lesson for me – defending the icon while simultaneously ceasing to be one.
The Holy Scriptures are an icon, which is why we still kiss them, as we did the scrolls in the temple. It is not true that we had no icons when we Orthodox were merely Hebrews and not yet Christians. My old Bishop used to tell me, when I asked “What about the butchered Protestant versions? Cut down to 66 books. And some of them barely constituting a translation, frequently taken from gnostic versions of the texts. Are they to be handled with respect?” He replied that ‘they mangle Christ as well. How would they not do so to his icon? Indeed, iconoclasm is at the core of their heresy. But we recognize that even a heretical icon deserves to be handled within the realm of reverence, which is why we burn them, not casually or disdainfully, but with prayers to the Saint depicted, however evil or wrong the depiction.’
So it’s not OK to thump even the “study bibles”, “living translations”, “good news versions”, and “translations from the latest texts” that have mangled holy writ. We don’t thump icons that presume to convey Christ or Christ through the Saints, one way or another. And regarding icons that are truly icons, we might carry them into war, since we stand against principalities and powers. We might carry them in other processions around our Churches, since we are sanctified by them, and since we are honoring the saints as if we held their flesh, though this also is a form of warfare. But we do not either wield them as axes on the merely misguided, or else treat them as casual things merely because they are not axes.
It’s not good to thump a book of G’Quan. Just ask a Narn ambassador. By the way, I hear they’re making a feature motion picture, for you fellow Babylon 5 fans.
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Very nice. I have a long essay which I am going to publish in a future book that explores “iconic heresy” in the later Middle Ages, with special reference to King Philip the Fair of France. Philip took his royal religion more seriously than perhaps anyone else in his family tree, which is saying a lot (St. Louis was his grandfather). The problem is, Philip played the king so well that many around him thought he was a “statue” (Bsp. Saisset). I argue in my essay that Philip, in a flare-up typicial “waning of the middle ages” literalism, tried to become an icon! In other words, following the monophysitic theory of “king’s two bodies” to a tee, Philip tried to nullify and obliterate his human operations and energies in order to be the divine king depicted in Ottonian art.
Another example of the period’s bizzare literalism involves a misunderstanding of the Orthodox “prayer of the heart,” which Henry of Susa, in the late Middle Ages, exhibited. In a fit of Western mystical ecstasy, Henry took literally the Scriptural injunction to write the name of Christ on the fleshy tables of the heart. He took up a knife and carved the word “Jesus” on his heart, blood flowing freely… He liked to show off his scar to anyone who would stand still afterwards…