MEMORIALIZING ANYBODY RISKS FALSE WORSHIP
Even if no scandals arise, time can change what counts as virtue, Jason Byassee writes.
It is not often that theology can illuminate a public discussion. But the current public investment in the question of memorials may be such a time. Why do we depict certain persons in bronze or stone and place them in positions of reverence? What happens when times change and those once proudly depicted now evoke public shame or anger?
Religious communities have been over these grounds before.
The Christian church has often struggled with whether to depict God or human beings in image or statuary. The second commandment of the Law of Moses prohibited such images. Only God creates. When human beings create images, we tend to worship them — the very definition of idolatry. The church’s Jewish elder sisters and brothers in faith tend to take the commandment more seriously than we Christians, wayward younger siblings that we are.
Islam, which sees itself as the culmination of previous revelations to Moses and Jesus, is even more strict in prohibiting images. This has yielded the vast Muslim universe of creativity in more abstract imagery and in poetry. Islam often has the virtue of tidying up what we Christians have left messy, and here as elsewhere it is clear: Don’t depict humanity, let alone God. Only God creates.
This is where the church differs from our fellow Abrahamic faiths. We depict Jesus Christ, whom we take to be God in flesh.
Why, when we still revere the Ten Commandments, and agree that making things often leads to idolatry? We believe the second commandment is in effect until the time of the incarnation.
But after the angel Gabriel tells an unmarried Jewish teenager from the sticks that God is going to take flesh in her untouched womb, something changes. Human beings should not draw God, indeed. But God has drawn God on the easel of human flesh.
After God “depicts” God’s self in Jesus, we not only may draw God, we had better do so. If we do not, we will forget that God has taken flesh in Jesus and lose the incarnation.
That’s the argument for icons developed by St. John of Damascus and others in the Eastern Orthodox churches. Orthodox Christians to this day fill their churches with images of Jesus, and also the saints. Orthodox believers light candles in front of the images, offer incense, kiss them, and say prayers in front of them.
These images are an extension of the incarnation: God in our flesh, God at work in the saints, and now God in our church. Jews and Muslims may see this behaviour and worry about idolatry. And they would be right — if God had not taken flesh.
But many other Christians disagree. The Reformed movement reacted against Roman Catholic statuary in the 16th century by, well, pulling down statues. Reformed Christians purport to take the Old Testament more literally and seriously than their fellow Christians, but more importantly they see the way statues of saints tempt people to idolatry and tempt the church to being what Calvin called “a factory of idols.”
It is a Christian thing, then, to depict God and humanity in images and to venerate them.
It is also a Christian thing to dismantle statues of God and humanity to ward off idolatry. The church has never been much good at consistency. One defence might be the words of Walt Whitman: We are large. We contain multitudes.
Now some shriller, more defensive voices are condemning what George Will calls the “defenestration” of statuary in the U.S. President Donald Trump is pondering erecting more statues, including of religious leaders like Billy Graham. Protesters are right to say they are tired of seeing white supremacists put in places of honour, their memory whitewashed, the blood on their hands left off the marble.
But the troubling questions are about those that Americans otherwise revere. Anyone for taking down the Jefferson Memorial, given his slavery and rape? What about the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps the grandest display in D.C., due to his more garden-variety 19th century racism? My Cree colleague at the Vancouver School of Theology describes a statue of John A. Mcdonald coming down in the Maritimes this way: “We put him in timeout.” That’s not bad. What about Gassy Jack here in Vancouver? The tourist postcard bait is of a man who did more than jabber at a bar. He also married a 12-year-old Indigenous woman — an act we now correctly recognize as rape. Timeout may not be strong enough — someone get the smelter.
Two problems remain. What do we put up instead? Clearly, one reason for the refenestration of Indigenous totem poles in this region is that these are public symbols we can nearly all agree upon. There would undoubtedly be more to suggest, especially from Asia and Africa.
The problem with memorializing anybody is that one era’s hero is another’s villain. And new information comes to light.
What if we had placed Jean Vanier in stone for his founding of L’arche, serving thousands of differently abled adults, before learning in the last year or two of his multiple abusive relationships with women? His father Georges Vanier, much commemorated in Canada, including in this city, has had no such scandal emerge. But anyone could.
“There is no one righteous, not even one,” St. Paul wrote, echoing Israel’s scriptures. Good reason for the second commandment that.
Human beings seem to need people to admire across generations — it’s good and natural. But a good rejoinder for now may be to leave those plinths empty. To do otherwise is to risk false worship. Or at least a future reckoning.
What if we had placed Jean Vanier in stone for his founding of L’arche, serving thousands of differently abled adults, before learning in the last year or two of his multiple abusive relationships with women? Jason Byassee
Islam often has the virtue of tidying up what we Christians have left messy, and here as elsewhere it is clear: Don’t depict humanity, let alone God. Only God creates.