Our world is image heavy. Images are now omnipresent to the extent that our minds are losing the subtle skill of differentiating good from bad or indifferent.
We skim through files of selfies to find the 'right one'. We try to sort any amount of online pictures to connect what we read with what we see. We click icons to reach, Hydra-like, more icons. Our eyes reach the point where the most satisfying image is the one out our window as the sun rises, anything other than this endless entourage of artificial attention-seeking. The eye is too busy.
In such a world many find it hard to figure why certain images could drive people to terrible acts like the murders in Copenhagen last weekend, or, previously, at Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
We understand the purpose of internet filters, we know why some images are restricted or unpublishable as 'not being in the public interest', and our bad drawing of the Eiffel Tower rightly goes into the recycler, but why ban an image of the Prophet Muhammad? Why is he an image-free zone?
The answer is not primarily political or artistic but theological.
The clue is in a statute of a meeting of bishops called the Second Council of Nicea (787 CE). This may seem obscure and unimportant to us, but the bishops weren't obscure and the issue was whether or not humans can make an image of God. The outcome of their meeting is decisive in the history of world art.
The eighth century was an interesting time to be alive. While many good people were keen to make images, or icons as they say in Greek, other good people were upset by the very idea of things being objects of veneration. These iconoclasts were prepared to destroy such icons, and even kill people, in order to stop what they saw as transgressive blasphemy.
An emperor would be unhappy with such business happening on his watch, hence Nicea.
Saint John of Damascus and his friends engaged in a profound human argument about the creative act. Christianity, like Islam, is not just a long history of agreements, it is a long history of arguments. Rightly understood, non-violent argument is an inheritance from these faiths that we all live with to this day.
While we may be comfortable with the idea that the entire created universe is an icon of God, humans are more conflicted about whether they themselves can or