88 RENAISSANCES

unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in
Heaven above or that is in the Earth beneath or that is in the water under
the Earth, thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them',1
were commandments which the Christian believed, just as unquestion-
ingly as the Jew, to be words of God which Man was required to obey
without any reservations.

The Ten Commandments were of the essence of an Old Testament
which the New Testament was perpetually invoking as its authority and
hallowing as the Scripture that Christ had come to fulfil. The Old Testa-
ment was consequently one of the foundation stones on which the edifice
of Christianity rested; but so, too, was the doctrine of the Trinity, so
again was the cult of the Saints, and so likewise was the visual representa-
tion of the Saints and of all three Persons of the Trinity in three-
dimensional as well as two-dimensional works of visual art. None of
these foundation stones could be pulled out from under the building
without danger of bringing it down. Yet how could Christian apologists
answer the Jewish taunt that the Church's Hellenic practice was irre-
concilable with her Judaic theory? Some reply was required that would
convince Christian minds that there was no substance in Jewish argu-
ments; for the tellingness of the Jewish exposure of the hypocrisy of the
Christian Church lay in the responsive conviction of sin which this
Jewish indictment evoked in Christian souls, Judaism was thus able to
take its revenge on Christianity by forcing the Church to fight on two
fronts simultaneously; and the foreign war against an obstinately uncon-
verted Jewry was less formidable for the Christian ecclesiastical authori-
ties than the domestic struggle, waged within the penetralia of each
individual Christian soul, between an Helleniedly easy-going Christian
paganism and a Judaically tender Christian conscience.

The duality of the conflict is reflected in Christian polemical literature
in the distinction between the genre of apologias for Christianity against
Jewish attacks upon it and the genre of controversies within the bosom
of the Church between Christian iconodules and Christian iconoclasts,
though the arguments bandied about in both genres, and taken over, on
either side, by successive generations of controversial writers from the
works of their predecessors, are, of course, identical to a large extent.*

i Exod. xx. 3-5. Cp. Lev. xxvx. i; Deut. y, 7-9 and vi. 14.

* Stock arguments in the armoury of Christian, iconodule apottweticK wer?: (i) that
God's veto, communicated to Moses on the Tables of the Law, forbidding the viaual
representation of human beings and animals, must have been at leant tacitly remanded
by Solomon's time, since Solomon is recorded in the Bible (nee x King* vi, 23 -at), •}»,
35, and vii. 25, 29, 36, 44) to have included graven images among the paraphernalia tfort
he introduced into his temple, but is not recorded to have got into trouble with the
Lord for having done this, though he is frankly recorded t« have tfot into trouble in th«
same quarter for other doings of his (see i Kings xi. 9-40); (ti) that Christian iwmoUutaa

reverence out of regard for the living beings of which they were lift-
and reserved their worship for God alone in His invisible spiritual

Iconodule arguments used at the turn of the sixth and seventh centime a in * tr
against the Jews published by the Cypriot Archbishop Leontiua of Ne.aj«>U« in On
also appear m the Armenian text of a tract againat Christian iccmodaatu that is attributed
to Leonttus s contemporary Vrt'anes K'ert'ogh (florebat circa A.n, 600), A French tranala-
t*0.11 ofy??11*8 trac?is given by Sl Der w^sessian, in 'Une Apologie de» Imagen du
vjieSiede ^uiB^anfzon.vol.xvii, 1944-5 (Baltimore, Md, 1945, Byzantina Inntitute and

them, they
paid them
:ion§,

,_. e«»ene>.

ith centuries in a tract
•reck
ited