RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS 89
After the nominal conversion, en masse, of an Hellenic Gentile World in
the course of the fourth century of the Christian Era, the domestic con-
troversy within the bosom of a now Pan-Hellenic Church tended to
overshadow the polemics between Christians and Jews; but the theo-
logical warfare on this older front seems to have flared up again in the
sixth and seventh centuries in consequence of a puritanical house-clean-
ing in Jewry which, in the Palestinian Jewish community, had been
taken in hand towards the close of the fifth century. This domestic
campaign, within Jewry's bosom, against a Christian-like laxity that had
latterly been tolerating the visual representation of animals, and even of
human beings, in the mural decorations of synagogues,1 had its repercus-
sions on a Jewish-Christian battle-front in a resumption of offensive-
defensive Christian polemical operations against the Jewish denuncia-
tion of Christian idolatry. When we turn to the parallel controversy
between Christian iconophiles and Christian iconophobes, we shall be
struck by its persistence and its ubiquity. From the morrow, and indeed
from the eve, of the Christian Church's victory over a pagan Diocletianic
imperial regime, we find this 'irrepressible conflict between opposing
and enduring forces'2 bursting out in almost every province of Christen-
dom in almost every succeeding century of the Christian Era.

In a still unfissured Catholic Church a ferment of Iconophobia can be
seen spreading in and after the fourth century. The exhibition of pictures
in churches was forbidden by the thirty-sixth canon3 of the Council of
Elvira (sedebat circa A.D. 300/11).4 Eusebius of Caesarea (vivebat circa
A.D. 264-340) refused to oblige Constantine the Great's sister, Constantia,
by granting a request of hers to him to send her a holy image. Epipha-
nius, Bishop of Constantia (alias Salamis) and Metropolitan of Cyprus
(vivebat circa A.D. 315-402; thronum conscendit A.D. 367), tore up a
curtain with a picture embroidered on it which he found hanging
in a church.5 In a Syriac Orient an attack against image-worship

Mediaeval Academy of America), pp. 58-69. A confrontation of parallel passages in
Vrt'anes* and Leontius's tracts will be found ibid., p. 76, See also N. H. Baynes: 'The
Icons before Iconoclasm', in The Harvard Theological Review, vol. xliv, No. 2 (Cam-
bridge, Mass. 1951, Harvard University Press), pp. 93-106. It was Professor Baynes who
first called the present writer's attention to Miss Der Nersessian's paper. See now also
Alexander, P. J.: 'Hypatius of Ephesus, A Note on Image Worship in the Sixth Century',
in H.T.R,, vol. xlv, No. 3 (195?), pp. 177-84,

* See Der Nersessian, S.: 'Une Apologie des Images du viie Siecle' in Byxantion,
vol, xvii, 1944-5 (Baltimore, Md, 1945, Byzantine Institute and Mediaeval Academy of
America), p, 79, citing, in n. 92, Frey, J. B.,'La Question des Images chez les Juifs% in
Biblia, vol. xv, 1934, p. 298. The date of this domestic campaign in Jewry against
intrusive idolatrous practices is historically significant. Coming, as it did, in the fifth
century of the Christian Era, on the heels of the successive Nestorian and Monophysite
reactions, inside the Christian Church, against the Hellenic element in Christianity,
this puritanical Jewish drive against an infection of Hellenism in Jewry's bosom can be
seen to have had its origin in the wave of Hellenophobia that began, in that century, to
rise from the depths of a submerged Syriac Society, and that continued thereafter to
swell up until it eventually broke upon the Hellenic World in an Islamic cataclysm.

2 William H. Seward at Rochester, N.Y., on the zgth October, 1858,

3 'Placuit picturas in ecclesifi esse non debere, ne quod colitur et adoraturin parietibus
depingatur.'

* Circa A.D. 300 according to Zeiller, J.( in Lebreton, J., and Zeiller, J.: Histoire de
V£gU$e, vol. ii (Paris 1938, Bloud et Gay), p. 399; circa, A.D. 3x1 according to Vogt, J.:
Constantin der Grosse und sein Jahrhundert (Munich 1949, Miinchner Verlag), p. 169.

s In this connexion it is perhaps significant that Epiphanius was a Palestinian of
Jewish origin.