Three
Apology and Antirrhetic:
Icon, Idol, Image, and the Forms of Law

He begins [his book] with these words, "I cannot see." And verily if he had there left it and gone no further it had been well enough. For as for the thing that he speaks of, it appears by his words he cannot see very well indeed .^[1]

The power of law has always been tied to the history and ambiguous status of images. Contemporary scholarship has frequently played with the paradoxical foundation of the Western legal institution both in and against images.^[2] The decalogue was presented in the forbidding and erased form of commandments inscribed in stone and also pitched dramatically against idols, false images, or other gods. The image not only represented the law, as father, justice, or truth, but it also represented the stake or substance of law that lay not in external, visible, or merely temporal things but in the invisible or internal governance of the soul. The image could either save or destroy, it could turn the inward eye toward reason, truth, and law, or it could seduce and hold vision upon the nothingness of the image itself as a

[1] Sir Thomas More, The Debellacyon of Salem and Bizance (London: W. Rastell, 1533) at fol. i. 1. a. This from a Lord Chancellor, commenting on the work of the barrister Christopher St. German, Salem and Bizance (London: Berthelti, 1533), a work which had the temerity to challenge a number of "defaults of the spirituality" and to question some of the "ex officio" procedures used by spiritual judges in bringing charges of heresy under the statute De Haeretico Comburendo . On the history of such challenges to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction see Robert Cosin, An Apologie for Sundrie Proceedings by Jurisdiction Ecclesiastical, of late times by some challenged (London: n.p., 1591).

[2] For recent general studies, see Legendre, Désir politique de Dieu ; Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l'image: Une histoire du regard en occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l'image (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993). Specifically on the foundation of law, see Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundations of Authority'" (1990) 11 Cardozo Law Review 919; Arthur Jacobson, "The Idolatry of Rules: Writing Law According to Moses, with Reference to Other Jurisprudences" (1990) 11 Cardozo Law Review 1079; and more broadly, Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Iconoclastes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976); Serge Gruzinski, La Guerre des images (Paris: Fayard, 1990); David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990); Jean Wirth, L'Image médiévale (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989); Douzinas and Warrington, Justice MisCarried, especially ch. 8.

spurious surface, a face, an idol, vanity, or lie. Whichever form the image took, either licit or illicit, iconic or idolatrous, its function was structural, it established the order of meaning and of law, it governed the soul by dictating what the heart could see or the mind portray of itself. In the striking words of one Reformation polemic on the cross, debating whether the crucifix was a legitimate image or admissible sign of divinity, "the world itself is a certain spectacle of things invisible." More than that, although less eloquently, "the order and frame of it, is a glass to behold the secret working and hidden grace of God. The heavenly creatures and spheres above, have a greater mark of his divinity, more evident to the world's eye, than either can be unknown or dissembled."^[3] In short, the world of appearance, of images, was either the sign or the dissimulation of an unseen, "aereall" or ghostly realm. It was for the law to determine the truth of the sign, its efficacy or force, and in doing so it would necessarily institute a governance of perception, a licit hierarchy of visible references, variously words, figures, signs, symbols, or statues that recalled or referred to the invisible order of true being.

The image played the law, either as the word, the inner sign of a dual nature, or as a figurative representation. In either case, whether it was the text alone, word, sacrament (verba visibilia ), or statuary figure that governed the direction of vision, the law had to dictate the terms of legitimate signification so as to command the mystery, faith, grace, or meaning that escapes and will always escape the dead letter of prose. The law, both spiritual and positive, had to distinguish the orders of unseen or absent causes: false imagining from true reference, fantasy from prophecy, vestige from image, spiritual essence from diabolic appearance. In each case or instance the definition of an order of true reference, a doctrine or creed, required the designation of an order of signs through which the faithful, the believers or subjects of law, could be ordered to imagine, perceive, understand, or know the invisible truth. While reformist movements have tended to be iconoclastic, their doctrines do not escape the dialectic of true and false images, the orthodoxy and heterodoxy of the sign, but rather they shift the boundaries of visible and invisible and redefine the legitimate signs of internal direction. The text or word is no less a sign than the graven image or statue, it is different, as is a Eucharist predicated upon the metaphoric presence of divinity or a church without incense, vestments, or ornaments.

[3] Calfhill, An Answere to the Treatise of the Cross at sig. 169v. The Answere was a response to John Martiall's A Treatyse of the Crosse gathred out of the Scriptures, Councelles and Auncient Fathers of the Primitive Church, by John Martiall Bachelor of Lawe and Student in Divinitie (Antwerp: I. Latius, 1564). For an excellent history of English iconoclasm, see Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts I: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); see also Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

The differences of doctrine or jurisprudence cannot conceal the common terrain or problematic of such difference. The question of law remains that of which mechanisms of reference or which visual insignia, external images, memories, or internal phantasms best mark and remind the subject of its obligations or best hold it to law. Such is a question of visual and linguistic rhetorics, a question of persuasion or fascination, of bending and moving the will so as to order the subject according to an image, a spiritual or inner law.^[4]

The significance and the danger, the stake or threat of the war of images may often be most apparent in the means of their denial. It is an old trope that the claim to represent an unadorned or literal truth is the most persuasive style of scientific or juridical argument. It is similarly an oratorical commonplace that silence will often refute an opponent much more effectively than the attention that comes with direct rebuttal. The image of objectivity is neither less combative nor any less imagistic for concealing its polemical force behind the assertion or figures of demonstrable truth.^[5] These are simply the figures of law, of a rhetoric that exists to deny rhetoric, of an imagery that functions to efface itself by excluding, exiling, or repressing its imagistic nature or quality. While a history of law and images must labor extensively to evidence convincingly the imagistic quality of modern law and its coldly prosaic texts, such difficulty or resistance signals the crucial motive force or power of the image of a legal science or modern and technical profession of law. The imagery that surrounds and subtends the normative, yet still quite particular, text of modern law does not escape the antagonistic context of its historical repression, nor does it escape the antinomic structural role that image and figure have played in law. Law was always, in terms of oratorical method, a specific and distinctively sophistic genre.^[6] While in certain formulations, associated

[4] The classic study of linguistic and visual rhetorics was Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1982). Most recently, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Yifat Hachamovitch, "In Emulation of the Clouds."

[5] It is not without relevance that the scholastic conception of demonstrable truth is predicated upon a visual metaphor. To demonstrate, from the Latin demonstrare , means to show or figure a truth that cannot otherwise be known. More broadly on visual metaphors and truth, see Jacques Derrida, "The White Mythology," in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982); Peter Goodrich, "We Orators" (1990) 53 Modern Law Review 546.

[6] Plato, Theaetetus , at 172 e-173 b argues that the legal orator, subject to the constraints of time and adversary circumstance, "is a slave disputing about a fellow slave before a master sitting in judgment with some definite plea in his hand." The rhetorician as lawyer "acquires a tense and bitter shrewdness . . . his mind is narrow and crooked. An apprenticeship in slavery has dwarfed and twisted his growth and robbed him of his free spirit." Tacitus, Dialogue of Orators (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1911 ed.) at 127–131, also associates legal rhetoric with decadence and decay.

particularly with Cicero and Vico, the method and ethos of rhetoric was deemed relevant to civic virtue and political stability or sensus communis , the practice of legal oratory was unambiguously associated not so much with the felicitous use of speech as with disputation, casuistry, apologetic, proof, and polemic. The ensuing analysis will retrace the history of that disputatious and polemical character of law to the early structure and jurisdictions of the institution, and more specifically to its doctrinal discourses on the image. These were antagonistic and combative in their rhetorical structure and practice, and while their concern was directly with the opposition between idolatry and iconolatry, iconoclasm and "image service," "latria and dulia ,"^[7] the structure of argument and the form of discourse became internalized within the rhetorical practices of law at the same time that the iconoclasm of the Reformation and the ascendancy of print forced the external image into its modern textual form as illicit figure or oratorical trope, metaphor, or "painted word" within the prose of law.^[8]

The argument will proceed in three stages. I will argue first that doctrinal discourses, the forensic rhetorics of foundation and of law, have historically taken on a specific structure of defense (apologia ) and denunciation (antirrhesis ) and that this structure is evident as well in the antithetical and polemical substance of the legal tradition as a set of practices. Each tenet of doctrine is matched historically and rhetorically by a figure of heretical exclusion or excommunication; each affirmative value or force of law is counterposed to an enigma, evil, or antiportrait against which the law stands as order pitched against excess, reason against fantasy, antiquity against novelty, nature against artifice, and nation against barbarism. The discourse of doctrine is the armature of virtue, and it is explicitly imperialistic in its battle to convince, to convert, and to control those within its spiritual and territorial jurisdictions. The second stage of analysis will take up certain implicit themes within the language, imagery, and figuration of doctrinal discourse. Certain apparently extrinsic or insignificant features

[7] Latria was the honor due to God, to God's own divine substance and incomprehensible nature, and could not be represented in any artificial image—"latria debetur Deo." Dulia was honor that also belonged to God but "is not properly belonging to his substance but to his government and lordship," and hence the honor of dulia could be given to images as "signs of good and godly things," N. Sander, A Treatise of the Images of Christ and of his Saints: And that it is unlawful to breake them, and lawfull to honour them (Omers: J. Heigham, 1624) at 80–81, 86.

[8] On print and image, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) at 66–70; Alain Boreau, "Les Livres d'emblèmes sur la scène publique," in R. Chartrier (ed.), Les Usages de l'imprimerie (Paris: Fayard, 1987).

of the structure and substance of doctrine will be put into play in the process of deconstructing the unitary images of systems of law. Specifically, the inexplicit yet repeated coincidence of image and femininity, vanity and void will be elaborated as a symptom of a certain structure of repression intrinsic to law. Finally, the stake and object of doctrinal forms of argument, of thesis and of treatise, of symbol and sign will be analyzed in terms of a semiotic structure or juridical form of discourse that works to bind the subjects of law to a series of unconscious dictates or laws of thought. The apology and antirrhetic will be measured successful—they will do their worst—when they capture, direct, and persuade the subject into the time and reason of institutional being.^[9] Whatever the surface of the text or the image of reason, the play and power of law rest upon a meaning, force, or desire that is held and transmitted beyond the letters of law, subauditio or unconsciously, as a textuality inhabited by and constitutive of the legal subject. The polemical or antirrhetic capture of legal subjectivity, the simple persistence of the dogmatic forms of the legal institution, is the product of a rhetorical order of thought or division (disposition) of reality that subsists over the long term of ecclesiastical and common law history, in the images, languages, and categories of a legal reason that long outlives the impermanent and tendentious forms of merely positive laws. Without an appreciation of those essentially antithetic rhetorical structures and their persistent semiotic force, the critique of contemporary legal forms, whether in ethical, feminist, literary, or sociological terms, is doomed to the status of a repetitious and ineffective play upon institutional surfaces that history and dogma will soon consume and forget.

Apologia, Antirrhesis, and the Foundations of Law

The defense of faith, of doctrine, creed or law, belongs in its positive formulation to the rhetorical genre of apologia , a Greek term "which signifies defence, not with arms, but with reason, answer in defence, excuse, purgation or clearing of that one is charged with."^[10] The rhetorical style of apologetic argument is agonistic, it is explicitly that of trial and of judgment,

[9] On the theme of capture by the institution, see Pierre Legendre, Paroles poétiques échapées du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982).

[10] The definition comes from the exiled English recusant Thomas Harding, A Confutation of a Booke Intituled an Apologie of the Church of England (Antwerp: Ihon Laet, 1565) at sig. 1r. The apology referred to in the title and confuted in the text is John Jewel, Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (London: n.p., 1562), translated as An Apologie or Answere in Defence of the Churche of Englande (London, n.p., 1564). The Confutation is in turn replied to in Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of England , and this in its turn is replied to in T. Harding, An Answere to Mr Jewells Challenge (Antwerp: Ihon Laet, 1565), and in T. Stapleton, A Returne of Untruthes upon M. Jewell (Antwerp: J. Latius, 1566). For an alternative etymology and elaboration of apology, see St. German, Salem and Bizance at fol. A iv b, deriving apology from the Latin responsio/defentio and proceeding to make "answer to some of his objections . . . whereby it appears that his objections proceed of little charity."

of combat and resolution: "In every Apology or excuse, three things meet together, the plaintiff or accuser, the defendant, the crime objected"; thus: "The Catholics and all good men complain and accuse . . . the new clergy of England answer in defence. . . . The thing objected is schism, heresy and breach of unity. They impugn the law by the words of the law. . . . So to overthrow the Church, they presume to take unto them the name of the Church."^[11] The antagonistic and antithetical character of the apology is evident in the manner of its formulation as a style and genre of institutional discourse. Not only is law counterposed generically to the heterodoxies of schism, heresy, and breach of unity but the antagonist is accused of the most extreme or diabolical dissemblance, namely that which perverts law in the name of law. What is most to be feared and so most rigorously refuted is that argument which simulates the truth of doctrine, which uses the languages and terminologies of faith, the figures and, at times, the phantasms or miracles of doctrine, to prove a dissolute, new-fangled, evil, or erroneous form of faith. In more modern terms, the apology must establish and defend the boundaries of tradition and the limits of thought. The apologist must be most stringent where the threat is closest, most guarded where the antagonist attempts to steal the very terms of doctrine itself for false ends, where the opponent genuinely challenges, competes, or realistically threatens the established faith. It is in such circumstance that apology most directly pitches images of the inside against those of the outside, affection against horror, salvation—or at least propriety, good manners, and its norms of constraint—against the mysticism, disorder, and plurality of other forms of reason, other Gods.

The apology is a genre that seeks to establish and to defend the law. It is properly a foundational discourse, and so in its primary aspect it seeks to represent in images that object of faith, reason, or truth which escapes definition by virtue of being the first, originary, or creative moment or act. The apology is the defining discourse of community, and so its positive characteristics lie in identifying, most often in eulogistic terms, the authorities, axioms, and other unities and longevities of the tradition. In a rhetorical formulation the positivity of dogma or doctrine can be identified with a series of topics or commonplaces that indicate explicitly the foundational qualities of law to the community of its subjects. The apology first establishes lineage in the sense of legitimacy, the unbroken succession of bishops, of doctrines, or of authorities within—depending upon con-

[11] Harding, Confutation at sig. 1r–v.

viction—the established or reformist church. Thus "chronographies"^[12] or "titles of antiquity"^[13] are invoked to evidence the preexistence and continuity of the community and doctrine against all novelties (novatores ) or newfangled thoughts.^[14] The power of antiquity and tradition lay not simply in age but in absolute and unbounded age, in first principles coincident with the indefinite time of origins: "For we must not hold antiquity to be that which is old . . . but that which is oldest, that is first and primitive, without any mixture, or derivation, or mingling, or meddling with following ages, and after times. . . . Truth must be searched in the original, before it hath been strained through the multitude of men's wits."^[15] Borrowing from patristic aphorisms, the truth is first and more ancient than men; all that follows the origin or comes afterward is by definition adulterous and merely human.^[16]

The claim to antiquity is in many respects a claim to nature, to a truth that is visible in the world prior to human history, written acheiropoietically, by God and not by any interpolating or interposed human hand: "The natural image expresses and imitates the very substance of that thing, whose image it is."^[17] Such inauguration, either in the "glass of the world" itself or in the heart, which knows the invisible scripture of law and which knows that all laws are written in the heart, founds an order of descent or of continuity, of an unbroken lineage from father to son.^[18] It thus

[12] Stapleton, A Fortresse of the Faith at sig. 139r–140r.

[13] The term is taken from John Selden, Titles of Honour (London: W. Stansby, 1614) at fol. c i a. See also at fol. c 4 b: "The best or first I took always for instar omnium ."

[14] Robert Parker, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies: Especially in the sign of the Crosse (London: n.p., 1607) at pt. II, 120, arguing that the accusers (i.e., the Catholics) are "newfangelists." For an earlier example, see Bishop Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes against the late blowne blaste, concerning the government of women, wherein be confuted all such reasons as a stranger of alte made in that behalf, with a brief exhortation to obedience (Strasborowe: n.p., 1559) at fol. E 4 b–F i a: "If men will decide weighty matters, hanging upon antiquity, they must not only counsel with the Bible, but exercise themself in ancient stories . . . for histories be the witness of time, the candle of truth, the life of memory . . . and the register of antiquity. Wherefore let no man disdain histories, or find fault with us though we travail in histories."

[15] Favour, Antiquitie Triumphing over Noveltie at 33.

[16] Ibid. at 39, citing Tertullian, "antiquior omnibus est veritas" and at 40, "id est verum quodcumque primum, id est adulterum quodcumque posterius."

[17] Sander, A Treatise of the Images at 101. For an interesting parallel, a theory of an acheiropoietic text, see Dr. W. Fulke, A Rejoinder to John Martials Reply against the Answere of Maister Calfhill (London: H. Middleton, 1580) at 133 (on the word or spirit as judge): "The spirit by his own substance incomprehensible, is by his effects in the holy scriptures visible, revealed, known, and able to be gone unto, taking witness of the scriptures and bearing witness unto them. . . . The Law of God is judge, not priests."

[18] Harding, A Confutation at 223: "The bishop of Rome, who is thought to have all laws in the chest of his breast (iura omnia in scrinio pectoris sui ), by making the second law" simply executes or carries out the first.

founds community upon a genealogy of authorities, a legitimacy of sources, and a succession of images—of bishops, sovereigns, pontiffs, legislators, communities, or laws—which have represented antiquity in its historical progression. While it is in some senses obvious in the context of the Reformation that the Roman Catholic Church was likely to assert the antiquity of its tradition, it is a feature of reformist doctrine also that the community of the protesters equally invokes histories of a more pristine faith and an origin older than that claimed by the sophistic or wrangling Romans. Thus, in the words of a scholastic English reformer, "the protestants are returned to the ancient faith which was in this land before Augustine came from Rome, which was not so much good in planting faith where it was not, as in corrupting the sincerity of faith where it was before he came."^[19] This antique or internal knowledge of law runs through the history of a community as an inner lineage, an identity of order and law derived through time and prescription: "For we have overthrown no kingdom, we have decayed no men's power or right, we have disordered no commonwealth. There continue in their own accustomed state and ancient dignity the kings of our country of England."^[20]

The apology instances that which the subject should desire, imitate, and identify with as a sense of community, paternity, or patria . Rather than specify in detail the positivity, identity, or substance of specific doctrinal apologetics, it is more important to return to the questions of form. The apology aims to establish community, to found law either in the formative period of an institution or during a period of crisis.^[21] The apology may simulate a certain didactic or dispositive structure of expression, but its rhetorical form is strongly antithetical. The exposition of institutions is necessarily predicated upon the rejection of their opposites: identity upon exclusion, desire upon fear or, going further, eros upon thanatos , affirmation upon negation, life upon death.^[22] In the rhetorical canon, antithesis is a figure of comparison whose argumentative function is to amplify or diminish the comparata ; it persuades reason "for the parts of the comparison being brought together, their likeness or unlikeness, their equality or inequality, is as plainly discerned."^[23] Antithesis as a figure of expression of

[19] Dr. W. Fulke, T. Stapleton and Martiall (two popish heretics) confuted and their particular Heresies Detected (London: Middleton, 1580) at 14.

[20] Jewel, An Apologie at fol. G i b.

[21] A classic and vehement example of the former is Tertullian, Apologeticus , in A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. 10 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1869).

[22] On the play of eros and thanatos as unconscious drives, see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle .

[23] Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence conteining the most excellent Ornaments, Exornations, Lightes, Flowers and formes of Speech commonly called the figures of rhetorike (London: H. Jackson, 1593) at fol. Y iii b. For other forensic discussions of antithesis, see Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique at 64–68, 201–207; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589) at 175 (on antitheton); Thomas Farnaby, Index Rhetoricus scholis et institutioni tenerioris aetatis accomodatus (London: R. Allot, 1633) at 55–58; John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil's (London: E. Cotes, 1657) at fol. M 6 b.

passion is a theme to which the next chapter will return in examining the rhetorics of law. In terms of the apology as a discourse of foundation, identity is built against the image of other doctrines, against other gods and other laws, against an outsider that represents the other as the threat of the nomadic, the alien, peregrine, feminine, or strange. The apology paints the image of community against the other, it lists its virtues against the sacrileges of opponents, its coherence and familiarity against the pestilence and monstrosity of those outside the creed.^[24] Doctrine depends upon an antiportrait or negative image, it proves doctrine by denouncing heresy, affirms jurisdiction by exclusion of illegitimate speech or by the power of excommunication. It conjures identity by showing the face, the plurality or void, of evil.

The generic rhetorical term that can be resurrected to describe the antithetical form of the apology is antirrhesis . It is defined uniquely by Peacham in the following manner: "Antirrhesis is a form of speech by which the orator rejecteth the authority, opinion or sentence of some person: for error or wickedness of it. . . . This form of speech doth especially belong to confutation and is most apt to repell errors and heresies, and to reject evil counsell and lewd perversions."^[25] Peacham proceeds to give the examples of Christ against Satan, Paul against the Epicureans, Job against his wife. Such are obviously not simply discourses against evil, but discourses against extremity and against threat. The antirrhetic is the form of verbal violence, the language of enforcement and of sacrifice referred to earliest by Polybius in terms of discourses directed "against those that have betrayed their friends and kinsmen," and by Hermogenes as vehement speech directed against exiles.^[26] In each case the definition of genre endeavors to capture the strength of aversion and the perilous stake of discourses against those that would destroy the identity of community, the

[24] Monstrosity refers to that which does not resemble its parents. On which, see Selden, Titles of Honour at fol. b 4 b. For a striking tabulation of those outside the faith, see John Godolphin, Repertorium Canonicum or, an Abridgement of the Ecclesiastical Laws of this Realm consistent with the Temporal (London: R. Atkins, 1678, 1687 ed.).

[25] Peacham, Garden of Eloquence at fol. N iv b–N v a. For general introductions to antirrhesis, see Peter Goodrich, "Antirrhesis: Polemical Structures of Common Law Thought," in A. Sarat and T. Kearns (eds.), Rhetoric and Law (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1994); and Peter Goodrich, "The Continuance of the Antirrhetic" (1992) 4 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 207.

[26] Polybius, Histories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 ed.) at 22.8; Hermogenes, On Types of Style (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 181, 1987 ed.) at bk. 1.8.52 (on vehemence).

reason of faith, or the establishment of laws. The antirrhetic gives a face to evil, it marks the reality of fantasm or the slippage of foundation, the image, idol, or void that is harbored within and threatens all positive forms. The apology is necessarily tied, in structure and in substance, to the antirrhetic. Denunciation is the hidden essence of apology even though as an aspect of form it is not always the most apparent feature of doctrine in periods of relative stability.^[27]

The antirrhetic, the genre of "words against," is not simply a stylized denunciation of those beyond the iconic boundaries of community or family, of those that "break the line," it is also a specific register of the passions and fears of doctrine and its institutions. The antirrhetic establishes doctrine upon a series of discourses against outsiders, heretics, iconoclasts, and radical critics. It builds the apologia , both doctrine and community, upon those passions that move the soul: upon hatred and denunciation, upon anger and disgust, upon fear and resentment. The earliest example is probably Tertullian, the patristic author of late second-century Carthage, whose Apologeticus was written explicitly against the threat of death. Even a synoptic account or tabulation of the surface figures of this inaugural Christian apology and its accompanying texts^[28] give an intimation of the substance of the antirrhetical form. The Christian community is defined against the perversions and deceits of a series of antagonists; it exists against the Roman Emperor, against sects, against Jews, against pagans, against heretics, against all other Gods: "The dominant trait of this writing was that of anger: an anger in the image of Tertullian's God, a God which must be understood as always at war against evil, an incensed God avenging a fallen world. . . . This anger is a style . . . it lends the discourse a tone and even colours the most abstract concepts."^[29] At all levels of Christian practice Tertullian advocated resistance to the behavior and norms of non-Christian communities. He wrote against the theater and public shows, against ornament, against images, against philosophy, against feminine enchantment, and against all forms of uncleanness and fornication. The list is a lengthy one, and it is only in the subsequent development of the tradition of apologetics that certain features of this "writing against" or antirrhesis become formulaic.

[27] For the argument that heresy is intrinsic to doctrine, see Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," reprinted as an appendix in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1982) at 220.

[28] Specifically, Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), De Spectaculis (of Theatre/Public Shows), De Idolatria (Of Idolatry), De Cultu Feminarum (Of Feminine Dress), De Anima (Of the Soul), De Carne Christi (Of the Body of Christ), all in A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Library , Vols. 3, 11, 16.

[29] Georges Didi-Huberman, "La Couleur de chair ou le paradoxe de Tertullien" (1987) 35 Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 9, at 11–12.

Tertullian explicitly associated his apologetics or refutations with a statement of the law. The Apologeticus begins in the form of pleadings and asserts that the Romans have ignored the law and failed in all attempts to act justly.^[30] The refutations and denunciations that follow are asserted in the context of the lawlessness of his opponents. Similarly, the celebrated first sentence of De Idolatria is the assertion that idolatry is the "greatest of all crimes" and the form of all crimes: idolatry is adultery, it is murder, lasciviousness, impurity, vanity, fornication, and lust.^[31] Later antirrhetical discourses borrow many of the figures of outrage and of hate that Tertullian and other patristic writers developed. Speech against extremism became an extremist form of speech. The exemplary antirrhetic, however, and the neologistic use of the term derives from Nicephorus, author of the Apologeticus Major and three Antirrhetici against the iconoclast emperor Constantine V.^[32] Written in response to questions posed by Constantine V, the Antirrhetici have the internal structure and logical form of a denunciation. While the object of denunciation is the reformist doctrine of iconoclasm, it should be observed briefly that the antirrhetic is also, as its etymology implies, an attack both in the sense of "words against" and "against words," specifically against "painted words," the verbal equivalent of the rhetoric of images.

In synoptic terms the Antirrhetici defend the icon as the model of an immediate relation between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, divinity and its manifest form: the icon represents the archetype, and it alone can direct the human eye from material forms to incorporeal truth. The icon is the imprint of divinity, the vestige, mark, or effigy of a spirituality that can be neither seen nor comprehended in its substance: "The icon is the counterpart [reflection] of the archetype, in it is found imprinted in visible form that of which it is the imprint. . . . It is not distinct from its model save for the essential difference of its substance."^[33] The icon is enigmatic, it directs the eye from the symbolic to the imaginary, from symptom to cause, from creation to creator.^[34] It is also

[30] Tertullian, Apologeticus at 58–61.

[31] Tertullian, De Idolatria at 1.1 and 1.3.

[32] References are to the recent French edition of the texts, M-J. Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Nicephorus, discours contre les iconoclastes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1989). For further commentary on the Antirrhetici , see M-J. Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Du visage (Lille: Presse Universitaire de Lille, 1982); G. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1983); G. Florovsky, "Origen, Eusebius and the Iconoclastic Controversy" (1950) 19 Church History 77; E. J. Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy (London: SPCK, 1930).

[33] Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Nicephorus, Antirrhetic I , at 277 A.

[34] The icon is enigmatic because its basis lies in Christ, in "the knowledge of the invisible and absolutely incomprehensible character of a unity of two natures." See Antirrhetic I at 309 C.

fundamental, it being the virtue of the icon to found the visible world. The icon makes nature possible—without circumscription and without icons "the universe in its entirety would disappear."^[35] Without visible form, of which the icon is the primary evidence and nature is similarly the image, there would be neither world nor subjects in it. The icon founds nature, and those that would destroy the icon threaten, quite literally, to destroy the world, to cast the visibility of nature into the limitless and uncircumscribed void of formless matter. Little wonder that the Antirrhetici proceed then to spell out the abhorrent features, the madness, adultery, and idolatry of those iconomachs who would destroy the icons, the perfect, acheiropoietically imprinted, visible signs of a divine nature.

The iconoclasts are thus stated to be the enemies of nature, the perverters of reason, the destroyers of sanctity and of the institution in all its forms. These adversaries of the icon are not simply impious and ignorant, they are nihilists, idolaters of nothing, heretics who have severed all relation with the visible world and who are in consequence without civility, filiation, kinship, or legitimacy, without family and without God.^[36] In frequent outbursts or exclamations within the Antirrhetici the opponents of the icon are depicted as mad, drunk, and bestial; they fornicate and pollute, they blaspheme and transgress the laws of nature and culture, reason and civility. In a strict sense they are no longer human, not simply because they are damned or in a spiritual sense "already dead," but because they have the souls of demons or in some instances "that of a dog, a pig or a savage beast."^[37] The antirrhetic form or genre establishes a particular and enduring type of denunciation and of antiportrait that is repeated, most often unconsciously, in discourses of, or against, the foundation of law. In a somewhat extended form the key figures of the antiportrait may be listed from the Antirrhetici and from later works that follow its typology.

In doctrinal terms the antiportrait depicts the iconoclast or idolater as sacrilegious, she steals from the person of God and of the saints. The iconoclast mocks all that is venerable, all consecration and piety: "He transgresses the written and unwritten law, he destroys tradition and respects nothing."^[38] There are two aspects to sacrilege, one positive, one negative. It is "a sin above all others," the sin of Satan, because it invades the person

[35] Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Antirrhetic I , at 244 D.

[36] For a contemporary analysis of filiation in these terms, see the texts collected in Pierre Legendre et al. (eds.), Le Dossier occidental de la parenté: Textes juridiques indésirables sur la généalogie (Paris: Fayard, 1988); A. Papageorgiou Legendre, Filiation: Fondement généalogique du psychanalyse (Paris: Fayard, 1990).

[37] Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Antirrhetic I , at 276 B.

[38] Mondzain-Baudinet, Discours contre les iconoclastes at 19. See further, Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Antirrhetic I , at 229 B, and Antirrhetic III , at 488 A et seq.

of the deity: in its positive formulation, sacrilege arrogates divine knowledge of good and evil to human beings. In destroying the visible world the powers of creation are transferred into the realm of darkness, of the formless and limitless substance of nothingness, of a world without sight or any direction of inner vision. In legal terms, we thus find sacrilege listed as a crime alongside "blasphemers, sorcerers, witches and inchanters," crimes that steal from the divinity so as to create other images and so other worlds.^[39] In its negative variation, sacrilege is straightforwardly destructive: it pollutes and so destroys holy places, sacred books, relics, and other sacral objects. It destroys the sites and tools, the architecture, of tradition and transmission at the same time that it pollutes the aura that authorizes knowledge.^[40] It is first and foremost unclean, and among the figures or emblems of that "shameless uncleanness" the most frequent and conventional is femininity: the sacrilegious image is variously a woman, an adulteress, a harlot, or a witch, and her polluted faith a nameless and "inchaunting void."^[41]

The reason of the iconoclast is that of delirium and dream, it is unreason manifest, a private language without either logic or audience. The iconoclast speaks the language of Babylon, and precisely in placing his faith in language rather than icons, in "building a Name for himself on earth," his punishment is confusion, dispersion, babel, and noncommunication.^[42] Without the power to communicate, deprived of all rules of logic and expression, locked in the private madness of analphabetic speech, "he ressembles an old illiterate and senile woman" with whom communication

[39] Sir Henry Spelman, The History and Fate of Sacrilege (London: Hartley, 1632, 1698 ed.) at 2. On the detail of these crimes, see, for example, the writs of abjuration listed in William West, The First Part of Symbolaeography . . . (London: T. Wright, 1590, 1603 ed.); and in Godolphin, Repertorium Canonicum at 528, defining sacrilege as "the violation or usurpation of some thing that is sacred. . . . It may be committed in three several ways," in respect of a person, a place, or a thing. For relevant legislation, see William Rastall, A Collection in English, of the Statutes now in Force, continued from the beginning of Magna Charta . . . (London: T. Wright, 1603) at fol. 65 d: "Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcraft" (5 Eliz. 1 cap 16, 1563). The crime is the worse for its effectivity: the dead are summoned (magic), new likenesses are formed (enchantment), the lost is found (divining), the future foretold (witchcraft), the unseen is seen (sorcery). The legislation referred to punishes according to the effects of the practises: where witchcraft killed or maimed the penalty was most severe. For a treatise that challenged these assumptions, see Reginald Scot, Scots Discovery of Witchcraft: Proving the Common Opinions of Witches Contracting with Devils, Spirits, or Familiars . . . to be but erronious conceptions and novelties (London: E. Cotes, 1586, 1654 ed.).

[40] Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Antirrhetic III , at 480 C et seq. Spelman, Sacrilege 23.

[41] Parker, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing at 7.

[42] Spelman, Sacrilege at 10–11. The reference is to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.4). For commentary, see Jacques Derrida, "Des Tours de Babel," in Jacques Derrida, Psyché (Paris: Galilée, 1987).

is no longer possible.^[43] Private language banishes all possibility of certainty, it threatens the institutions of meaning and denies any potential for agreement or commonality, respect or obedience. The demise of tradition and culture is also, finally, the death of nature: the iconoclast is a monster, a homosexual, an illegitimate being without similarity or resemblance to anything known. Antinature is in one sense simply that which lacks resemblance: in Selden's definition "one not like his parents is, in some sort monstrous, that is, not like him that got him, nor any other of the ascending or transverse line."^[44] In a broader sense, the nihilistic unreason of the iconoclast brings with it a madness of nature, in which those who deny the relation of the icon to its model refuse all the fecundity of semblance and of similitude, they are sterile, obscene, and unproductive, "excluded from nature itself which lets loose earthquakes, famines, epidemics, cataclysms of all sorts, to express its suffering before such hatred towards God."^[45] The conclusion of the Antirrhetici is thus the threat of perdition and damnation, of a world that is unknown and unknowable, a world populated by the damned, by nomads, lepers, nihilists, and other untouchables. There, in short, is what nature, reason, and law must be defended against.

Finally, and in more pragmatic rhetorical terms, there is the ad hominem vehemence of the antirrhetic to be accounted and the specific secular institutional correlates of its doctrinal exclusions to be tabulated. Moving to the example of the apologetics of the Anglican Church and its various defenses of its unitary ecclesiastical and secular polity, the strength of animadversion should again be noted. The antiportrait is here no less virulent, but it is more directed and closer in antinomy to the positive proposals of the apology. The antiquity of the tradition is opposed to the novelty of reform; the universality of the true church is counterposed to the local and particular character of its opponents; the reason of doctrine or creed is compared to the dreams and fantasies, tragedies, and delusions of heterodoxy; the unity of faith is contrasted to the diversity and dispersion of disbelief. Thus, to take a few limited examples, Jewel in his Apologie asks "what manner of men be they, and how is it meet to call them, which fear the judgment of the holy scriptures . . . and do prefer their own dreams, and full cold inventions: and do maintain their own traditions, have defaced and corrupted how these many hundred years the ordinances of Christ and of the apostles?"^[46] In response, Harding depicts Jewel and others as being fit to be "likened to enchaunters, necromancers, and witches. . . . For as they say that they have their books and their mysteries

[43] Mondzain-Baudinet, Discours contre les iconoclastes at 19.

[44] Selden, Titles of Honour at fol. b 4 a.

[45] Mondzain-Baudinet, Discours contre les iconoclastes at 20.

[46] Jewel, An Apologie at fol. B vi b.

from those doctors, and first fathers . . . but can not show the delivery thereof by any succession from hand to hand."^[47] Somewhat earlier in the same work, the defenders are "compared to a mad dog. . . . For as the mad dog runs up and down, here and there, and now bites one thing, and now another, snaps at man and beast and rests not in one place: so this Defender to deface the Church, shows himself to have a very unquiet head. He starts from one thing to another, and settles himself in no one matter, but in malice."^[48] Jewel responds, unsurprisingly by again terming the Catholic recusant a harbinger of counterfeit traditions, vain images, empty names, a "tainted visage" and "pseudologia," or false rhetoric and painted words.^[49] For a concluding example that also illustrates the directly antinomic character of the genre and its tendency to argue by inversion, Thomas Stapleton begins his attack upon Jewel's Apologie by stating that he is one who "calls evil good and good evil, he is one who in hypocrisy speaks lies, who has put his hope in lying and lies have been his safeguard . . . for what kind of authors has he not corrupted, misalledged, false translated and by one means or another abused?," to which it is added that his book is "dissemblance and dissimulation, hypocrisy, untruth, wilful and manifest falsifying, a lewd book."^[50]

It may usefully be observed that the antirrhetic of the Reformation, even in the above synoptic sketch, differs or at least expands in important respects from the earlier forms. While the structure of antirrhesis is not manifestly different in doctrinal terms—the antagonist is still nihilistic, hypocritical and against nature, reason, and law—it nonetheless reflects the changing circumstances of the early modern world. In a generic sense, which will be taken up again in subsequent chapters, the antirrhetic became more nationalistic and particular. Its concern was with the portrait of England and of its national traditions, with the vernacular and with local customs, habits, and laws. Such an identity is not created ex nihilo but is forged in an antirrhetic fashion against the Roman Church and Roman laws. Moreover, it is developed against an image of the foreigner, the alien or other as that which exists just beyond the boundary of nation or the narrative of its laws. The other, peregrina ceremonia (foreign ceremony) or ritus peregrinus (alien rite), by definition disturbs and innovates; the other is unworldly and too worldly, immature, irrational and mendacious, he or she practices illusion and other "juggling deceits."^[51] The danger associated with the other is that of disturbing the way things are, of intruding

[47] Harding, Confutation at sig. 229v.

[48] Ibid. at fol. 207 b.

[49] Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie at 4 and 297.

[50] Stapleton, A Returne of Untruthes at Epistle and Preface.

[51] The terms are from Parker, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing at 79.

through discourse, criticism, or imagination upon the sleep of reason or the unconscious, complacent, and content establishment or habitude of common law. Such a theme will, however, take the analysis beyond the classification of the topics and forms of the antirrhetic. The current argument will thus return to the issue or stake of the antirrhetic in the relation of image to word and of word to law. Two specific arguments will be addressed, the one concerned with the status and fate of the image in relation to the text, the other with the role of both image and text in the governance not simply of perception or vision but of thought itself.

Image, Icon, and Idol

That the vehemence and passion of the antirrhetic returned and returns so persistently to the evil or the power of images cannot be viewed as an accidental feature of doctrinal history.^[52] The war of, or against, images was fought for control of what in the Renaissance and in postmodernity is reckoned as being the ultimate means of persuasion and conversion, of communication, knowledge, and power. For Tertullian all crimes were committed "within the sin of idolatry," for in idolatry "were all the concupiscences of the world."^[53] The idol, which for Tertullian included all images or likenesses of things, both internal and external, detracted from or was interposed between the divine cause and its human subject: "Everything is worshipped by human error except the creator of everything himself. The images of these things are idols, the consecration of these images is idolatry."^[54] Any form of imitation or mimesis was idolatrous because imitation interposed itself between the subject and an invisible truth as well as lying by claiming a resemblance or mimetic relation between the representation and the form. Two issues follow. The first is to observe Tertullian's preference for the word over the image, for prose over poetics and, in effect, for an internal governance inscribed directly by the divine or ghostly power rather than through the mechanisms of human representa-

[52] In a strictly contemporary sense there is something of a revival in the condemnation of images. This new antirrhetic gains its most explicit voice in Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal (Paris: Galilée, 1990) and in a vast array of occasional essays, as Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983), and Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images . For brief but informed discussion of this attack upon the idols of postmodernity see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Epilogue; Gruzinski, La Guerre des images at 309–336. See further, Régis Debray, Cours de mediologie generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). In a rather different vein, see Michèle le Doeuf, The Philosophical Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).

[53] Tertullian, De Idolatria at 1.1 and 1.6. For discussion of the theory of acheiropoietic images, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l'image at 218–231; E. Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm," 8 Dumbarton Oaks Papers 112–115.

[54] Tertullian, De Idolatria at 4.2

tion: "For since without an idol, too, idolatry may be practised, certainly when an idol is present, it makes no difference of what nature it is."^[55] The concern was to excise all forms of visual representation, whether idol, image, or phantasm. More than that, however, the image was associated by Tertullian with ceremonies and rites, with "pomp of dress and finery," with immodesty and fornication.^[56] In condemning the theater, for example, Tertullian again associates it with pomp of dress and finery, with lust and idolatry: "At first the theatre was properly a temple of Venus . . . as well as the house of Bacchus. . . . That immodesty of gesture and attire which so specially and peculiarly characterises the stage are consecrated to them, the one deity wanton by her sex, the other by his drapery."^[57]

Tertullian's concern to outlaw the image was directly correlated to a fear of the fascination of the visible, the temptation which comes through the eye and fascinates through excess or beauty, through pomp and circumstance, rite of dress or ornament, through immodesty or other shows of the body, gesture, and attire.^[58] The disquisition on the veiling of the face of virgins concludes thus by censoriously recommending this blocking up of the pathway of temptation: "For who will have the audacity to intrude with his eyes upon a shrouded face? a face without feeling? a face, so to say, morose?"^[59] The image, so desecrated as an idol and so lauded as an icon, was consistently defined, eulogized, or denounced in terms not only of its force but of its sensuality and of the concupiscence of the eye. Idolatry was adultery, the service of images a sin of the flesh. The image was perceived variously as a vanity, a nothing, a harlot, and a pollutant. In each instance the image was a material block or support of internal vision, it was interpolator veritatis, it was mediante imagine, imitation, relative presence, counterfeit, symbol, or simulacrum.^[60] The initial point to be made is simply that the image is a body, a material presence, and also a reference to a body. For Tertullian "it is the same desire (libidinis ) to see and to be seen."^[61] Whereas for later authors the voluptuous quality of the image refers to the love that should be directed toward the divinity, the image is

[55] Ibid. at 3.3

[56] Ibid. at 1.6. More directly on this correlation, see Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum at 314: "That salvation—and not of women only but likewise of men—consists in the exhibition principally of modesty," and at 317: "For that other, as soon as he has felt concupiscence after your beauty, and has mentally already committed [the deed] which his concupiscence pointed to, perishes."

[57] Tertullian, De Spectaculis at 18.

[58] See particularly De Virginibus Velandis (On the Veiling of Virgins), in Ante-Nicene Library, Vol. 18, at 177.

[59] Ibid. at 179.

[60] The classical aphorism is from Lactantius, "ut religio nulla sit, ubi simulachrum est," cited in Calfhill, An Answere to the Treatise of the Cross at sig. 6v.

[61] Tertullian, De Virginibus Velandis at 178 (eiusdem libidinis est videri et videre ).

nonetheless proximate to the body, the cross in one example being "given as a sign upon our foreheads, like as circumscision was to the Israelites: by this we Christian men differ and are discerned from infidels."^[62] The sign of the cross on the forehead was effective also by virtue of being near to the imagination (propter propinquitatem imaginationis ).^[63] The sign was here self-evidently close to the mind, it was a reference to the body that bore it as well as to the body it bore.

The image, the face or mask, is at best an epistemic form, a sensible register of memory, an imprint of experience through which the subject learns and recollects.^[64] The seventh Council of Nicea, translated by Martiall, thus defined the licit use of images as remembrance that would "lead the looker to desire the first samplers and patternes which they resemble. . . . Honour and reverence done to an image redoundeth to the glory of the first sampler and patterne, and he that adoreth and honoreth an ymage doth adore and honour that which is resembled by the image."^[65] The image and the sacrament alike were modeled upon the conception of a visible sign which directed vision from external to internal, from sense to reference and from body to soul. For the reformers, however, the eye was too dangerous and powerful a medium: all images threatened to interpose between the spirit and its spiritual referent, to enchant, corrupt, or distract the concentration of the inward eye. The best medium of faith was the text and the word through which the subject could "hear" the truth without interposition or interpolation. Its archetype was not a visual sign or visible thing but rather an inner voice, an unconscious that spoke directly without the intercession of human voice or artificial words: "He that speaks with tongues, speaks not with men, but unto God, for no man hears him. . . . Spiritus autem loquitur mysteria, the spirit speaks mysterie, and spiritu licet mysteria loquator, in the spirit mysteries speak."^[66] The word, in short, could take the place of the acheiropoietic image: relying only incidentally upon sense or vision, the word and hearing could act much more directly to control and direct the order of inward things, the governance of the soul.

The difference between image and word is a difference of substance and so also of organ, but not of referent. The image referred to the prototype, it was not the visible sign but the invisible grace or enigmatic referent that was the object of iconic direction. For the advocates of images and other symbols the iconic inscription had the advantage of being

[62] Martiall, A Treatyse of the Crosse at fol. B 8 b.

[63] Parker, Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing at 133.

[64] In which context it is also proof, see Piyel Haldar, "The Evidencer's Eye: Representations of Truth in the Laws of Evidence" (1991) 2 Law and Critique 171.

[65] Martiall, A Treatyse of the Crosse at fol. F 1 b–F 2 a.

[66] Stapleton, A Returne of Untruthes at sig. 107v.

immediate—it was the inward imagination of the thing itself, a relative presence. It also had the advantage of being continuous over time and of addressing all people. The image was necessary and inevitable since "all knowledge comes by our senses, of which our eyes are the chief . . . and so often as the mind will either use or increase its knowledge, it always returns to these images and figures"^[67] by and through which experience had recorded inwardly the evidence of the senses. The image would teach and it would direct, it would represent and it would persuade, it would "more styrre the mind's of men to vertue, than the bare lettre read in boke."^[68] However powerful the image was, its proper power was natural: "The first and chief honour naturally belongs to the thing itself, the second to the inward image, the third to the reporter," namely the icon, symbol, sign, or "paincted table" which first moved the inward sense or imagination.^[69] Provided that the thing itself left its vestige, imprint, or mark, the eye would move the soul to inquire of the substance of the outward form.

In later defenses of imagery, the affective and sensual quality of the image, its power to touch and to suggest, was emphasized as much as the heuristic value of sight. The visible form of God, according to one much debated defense of imagery, "carries off [rapiamur ] our hearts to the contemplation of his invisible deity. . . . The pictures or images of his nativity, passion, resurrection and the like . . . serve to put us in mind of what he did and suffered for us."^[70] The same point emphasizing the role of connection or analogy between representation and its object was repeated by means of a striking example: "Is there nothing then in a picture worthy of admiration, besides the painter or artificer? I dare avouch for the greater part of Ladies, who sit for their pictures, that they do it not purely to beget in beholders an admiration of the painter."^[71] Similarly, while the soul may not be capable of visual representation, the representation of the body leads to contemplation of the soul, which gives the body sense. More than that, the defense of imagery suggested a relation between devotion and imagination, adoration and vision, thought and affection. The image pleased and moved the mind, it acted upon sense so as to direct the spirit and to reflect the passion and the pain, the awe and the fear, which lay at the heart of the Christian narrative. It was, however, precisely the affectivity and sensuality of the image, the pleasure it caused in stirring the mind, that the iconomachs and iconoclasts attacked in terms remarkable not only for their virulence but for the imagery of sense and of carnality, of

[67] Sander, A Treatise of the Images at 76–77.

[68] Martiall, A Treatyse of the Crosse at fol. P 7 b.

[69] Sander, A Treatise of the Images at 160.

[70] Thomas Godden, Catholicks no Idolaters or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's Unjust Charge of Idolatry against the Church of Rome (London: n.p., 1672) at 79.

[71] Ibid. at 86.

desire and sexuality, which pervaded the purportedly bare texts or plain English of reform.

The image was both "falseness and vision."^[72] As falseness, the image was simultaneously confused and confusing, it mixed the orders of being and conflated the external and the internal. In epistemic terms the image was a species of error: the dual nature of divine visibility—of Christ as image of the Father—was an impossible and incomprehensible or ineffable union such that "no man ought to imagine, a division or confusion, contrary to the true sense and will not able to be expressed: and the same union being above reach of knowledge, of two natures agreeable in one person, so what a mad opinion is this of painters, who for filthy lucres sake, endeavour to make those things that cannot be made, and go about with their wicked hands to express counterfeits of those things, which are only with the heart and mouth acknowledged."^[73] The image attempted an impossible representation and it was this impossibility which reformers deemed the falseness of representation. The image was hypocritical and mendacious, it abolished and defaced the majesty of divinity, it was a "doctor of lies . . . because as soon as Good is presented in an image, he is deprived of glory, and changed into a bodily, visible, circumscribed, and finite majesty. . . . We may not bind the presence of God, the operation of his spirit, and his hearing of us to any thing."^[74] God is unbound and therefore those who would bind him to an image neither knew God nor remembered him but rather confused creature or artifact for the creator, and to this the reformer would add that "it is idolatry to worship God as present there, where he is not present."^[75] In this aspect, idolatry was first and foremost nihilation, a false knowledge which in attributing presence to an image misunderstood the external for the internal, the inanimate for the animate, and so variously denigrated, denied, or destroyed the divinity within. Images might heighten affection, but if this was by "calling to mind that Being I am to worship, then they must be supposed some likeness, or analogy, or union between the object represented and the image, every one of which tends highly to dishonour of the Deity."^[76] The idol was in this regard "a

[72] William Wake, A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Idolatry (London: W. Rogers, 1685) at 55: "There is nothing but falseness and vision in all his notions and authorities," refuting Godden, Catholicks no Idolaters . The latter text in turn refuted Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry practised in the Church of Rome (London: H. Mortlock, 1671). Parker, Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing at 133, offers a similar definition of idol in terms of images that work inducere ad falsa .

[73] Calfhill, An Answere to the Treatise of the Cross at sig. 56v.

[74] William Perkins, A Warning against the Idolatrie of the last time (Cambridge: Legat, 1601) at 24.

[75] Parker, Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing at 3.

[76] Stillingfleet, A Discourse Concerning Idolatry at 60.

nothing . . . but only that thing represented"; it was either pure surface, a "false show"^[77] or it was "a nothing which has no being,"^[78] a counterfeit, a shape without a soul in the strict sense that it bore neither resemblance nor relationship to the being it purported to depict: idolum nihil representat, quod subsistat (the idol represents nothing which endures). The impossibility of the image was that of an impossible likeness, it created a form without presence and as such it represented an illusion or fantasm, an incitement to sense without reference and, more broadly, to plurality and to other Gods.

The idol as nothing, void or nonknowledge might seem to need to further denunciation beyond such designation and proscription, yet even the figures of void and nothing carry a certain license and licentiousness.^[79] Hammond lists seven forms of idolatry, and Selden lists no less than ten, beginning with other gods (dii alii ) and ending with sacrifices to demons (sacrificiarunt daemonis ).^[80] As Tertullian had lengthily warned, the empty form or nonbeing of the image was an incitement not only to sensuality, a vision that rested on, rather than moving through and beyond the material form of the image, but it was also an invocation to other gods, to spirits, demons, aereall and ghostly forms which "by an influence equally obscure" might come to inhabit such objects and "breathe into the soul . . . with cruel lusts accompanied by various errors."^[81] The secondary senses or definitions of the image were thus more complicated and extensive than the attribution of nonbeing would at first suggest. The image was a dream, a phantasm, a superstition of other Gods. More important, in terms of the imagery of this counterimagination, the image was a vanity that would

[77] Sander, A Treatise of the Images at 106–109. The more detailed distinction offered by Sander was between false shows and wrongful appearances. The former referred to "a thing shown [which] neither was, nor is at all extant anywhere . . . nothing in this world . . . they are not," and the latter were "idols that are something in nature but nothing in faith. . . . Idols be also (or have a being in the world) but in respect of salvation they be nothing." For a much later version of the same argument, see Wake, A Discourse Concerning , especially at 16–21.

[78] Henry Hammond, Of Idolatry (Oxford: H. Hall, 1646) at 1. See also Calfhill, An Answere to the Treatise of the Cross at sig. 185v: "Scimus quod idolum nihil est" (we know that an idol is nothing). Compare Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal at 25: "In the style of the baroque, we are the unrestrained creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts. We are not, however, those that destroy images but those that create a profusion of images in which there is nothing to be seen." For a polemical discussion of the aesthetic and philosophical context of that theme, see Luc Ferry, Homo aestheticus: L'Invention du gout à l'age démocratique (Paris: Grasset, 1990), especially ch. 5.

[79] On which see Aston, England's Iconoclasts at 466–479; Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (London: Macmillan, 1987).

[80] Ibid. at 1–5; John Selden, De Idolatrae , in John Selden, De Diis Syris (London: G. Stansby, 1617) at 140–148.

[81] Tertullian, Apologeticus at 97.

seduce or entice the onlooker into transgressions of the flesh. Hammond's third meaning of idol is most explicit: it is "pollution, filfth by which any man is contaminated. This is rendered sometimes as abomination, but more frequently as idol than anything else, which certainly refers not only to the pollution of the soul by the commission of that sin . . . nor only to that other notion of spiritual fornication, but principally to the abominable sins of uncleanness, and filthiness, which those idol worships were ordinarily guilty of."^[82] The imagery which follows the Judaic definition of pollution and uncleanness is redolent of a sense of sin that goes beyond the merely imaginary: idol worship is "inversion of nature, disorder of marriage, adultery, and shameless uncleanness," it "inflames . . . with practices of fornication, whoring and the like . . . [with] lust, abominations, inordinate desire and naughtiness." Those that worshiped images were "those that rape and steal women or virgins," they were "wanton" and "lascivious," a theme and imagery of sensual excess to which the treatise returned again and again.^[83]

The rhetoric or antirrhetic of iconoclasm is extraordinarily full of misogyny, of textual images, figures, and tropes which vitiate not only femininity but all ornament, vestment, and accident of appearance and of the senses. The image is an extravagant woman, a perpetual threat of excess, of plurality, and of transgression:

We must compare the cross [i.e., image] with an harlot, say we then that the Cross is no idol now, because it hath no adoration, which is the soul of an idol, that is as if we should reason, this woman ceaseth to be an adulteress any longer, because now at present she is not actually in that copulation, which is the life, and the very soul of adulterous crime. No, an harlot remains an harlot though her sin be past: and so the sign of the cross an idol, though this idolatry be ceased among us.^[84]

Elsewhere in his Scholasticall Discourse Parker offers innumerable further correlations between adultery, infidelity, sensuality, fornication, and images: "The image is an harlot, and man is no otherwise bent on worshipping it (if he may have it and see it) than he is bent to fornication in the company of a strumpet."^[85] The image is not simply a void, a vagina, it is also a vanity: it is of no profit or use, it is vain, superfluous, needless, unbearably light, too playful, too merry, too histrionic, it is otiose rite, a vain

[82] Hammond, Of Idolatry at 1. Compare Tertullian, De Idolatria at 2.3: "However, we already know clearly how much wider meaning the Lord assigns to these sins, since He already indicates adultery in desire, when namely somebody casts a lascivious glance and rouses a lecherous excitement in his soul."

[83] Hammond, Of Idolatry at 8–9, 11, 12–15, 18.

[84] Parker, Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing at 19–20.

[85] Ibid. at 137.

thing, a miscarriage.^[86] Following the miscarriage or the aborted character of images, it is noteworthy that the image is further termed not simply vanity, but incurable and bitter; its thigh rots and its belly swells, it is "an instrument of witchcraft, yea a very inchaunting void."^[87] The latter attribution of witchcraft and sorcery to the image and to women should not detract from the simple correlation of image and woman, a correlation that long outlives the various wars of images and their explicit reference to plastic or painted representations. With print and with the fusion of church and state, of spiritual and temporal law, it can be argued—following the maxim ut pictura poesis (as in painting so also in poetry)—that the war against images moves from picture to text, from painting to prose, from statue to figure and trope.^[88]

Captives of the Soul

One final if curious example of the correlation of woman and image can be taken from a passage in Stillingfleet's Discourse of Idolatry , where he refutes the notion that because the image refers to the prototype, the image can be given a relative honor or dulia appropriate to something that resembles the prototype. Such, Stillingfleet argues, would be "just as if an unchaste wife should plead in her excuse to her husband, that the person she was too kind with, was extremely like him, and a near friend of his, and that it was out of respect to him that she gave him the honour of his bed."^[89] Again, the image is a woman and idolatry a feminine vice in which sense and spirit become confused. The argument from the image and from likeness is equally hypocritical, a knowing deceit, a lie. Law is here confounded by the levity, mendacity, and carnality of femininity as an image and as the constant threat of contingency, of a sensuous materiality or surface upon which vision can all too easily terminate. Although this correlation will be taken up again in varied contexts in subsequent chapters, it may serve to illustrate here a certain baroque practicality to the discourse on images: while the textual images manipulated against imagery may indicate certain ironies and further contradictions or at least paradoxes, the underlying issue behind the movement against idolatry was not strictly theological or philosophical but rather concerned the institution of a particular type of writing, a prosaic law, a mode of institutional being and subjective restraint.

[86] Ibid. at 134–136.

[87] Ibid. at 10 and 7.

[88] See Erich Auerbach, "Figura," in Erich Auerbach (ed.), Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

[89] Stillingfleet, Discourse Concerning Idolatry at 88.

It is perhaps somewhat obvious that the attack upon imagery was a means of institutionalizing a specific mode or style of thinking as well as a particular regulation of behavior and restraint of desire.^[90] Where Stilling-fleet in effect preaches fidelity of sexual behavior, the antirrhetic was not slow to expand its objects from the images in the world to the images in the text and images in the mind. In terms of the former there is often a strange homology between the image in the world and the image in the mind, such that extinction of one was thought to lead to the destruction or cure of the other. The external image always threatened to fascinate or fixate, to delight or bemuse, but its ability to arrest or terminate vision upon the material object or painted surface has to be understood according to a phenomenological model in which the visible is only a metaphor for the invisible order. The spirit or mind was capable of an inner vision, and it was this internal perception that required the most stringent ordering. There is indeed a hierarchy of visibilities within which it is the eyes of the soul that can see all things both visible and invisible: "The eyes of the spirit (oculi spiritus ) are able to see things, that be not seen, and have no being. . . . The eyes of the mind (oculi anima ) will pass through all obstacles whereas the eyes of the body (oculi corporales ), that see visible things, cannot do so much."^[91] The eye of the mind was ideally to become the eye of faith and so to turn from things visible to things unseen. Truth lay not in visible signs but in the soul, and the soul could only be seen by "inward spiritual eyes."

The governance of perception or the banishing of external images from the ecclesiastical kingdom and jurisdiction was not an end in itself but simply one stage in the war against the idols of the mind.^[92] It was the imagination, the spirit or heart, the poetry, imagery, or ornaments of prose that were ultimately the objects of direction. The church would act externally as pastoral watchtower (specula pastoralis ) to govern the soul but had also to implant within, "for he made a temple to himself within the mind of man, living and clear."^[93] For the reformers, the living truth or internal vision was to be directed singly and solely by the bare word, by the litera or text, and not by any idol of the soul or false mental image: "The right way

[90] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), of course, develops just such an argument at the level of cultural forms of knowledge or epistemes.

[91] Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie at 273.

[92] For a lucid and provoking discussion, see Aston, England's Iconoclasts at 452–466. Such is also a significant theme in Freedberg, Power of Images , especially ch. 1 and ch. 12; see also Wirth, L'Image médiévale , pt. IV. The term "mental idol" comes from John Smyth, Paralleles: Censures: Observations (1609) in John Smyth, The Works of John Smyth , ed. W. T. Whitley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915) at ii. 348.

[93] Calfhill, An Answere to the Treatise of the Cross at sig. 59v.

to conceive god, is not to conceive any form: but to conceive in mind his properties and proper effects. So soon as the mind frames unto itself any form of God an idol is set up in the mind. And the form of things internally conceived in mind, are never worshipped of us, as painted and carved images be."^[94] In short, the imagination, unless strictly governed, would feign images and frame idols, it would pursue "tragical fantasies" and other improper thoughts, the vain pleasures of the surface and of the skin. Here then was the key to reform, it lay in the governance of thought, the control of men's minds through the expulsion of images from reason and figures from the texts of law. Whether outside or inside, the image was a woman and she represented the sorcery of thought, the possibility of imagining either through the figures of internal speech or through the tropes—the energeia —of the printed text.

That thought or internal images rather than external observance increasingly became the object of direction was at one level a logical corollary of the movement from images serving as the books of the illiterate or idiota to the vernacular translations and the printing of the Bible. It is in this context that the dispute as to the powers and dangers of rhetoric within doctrine gained considerable and altered emphasis. The new image was the visible word, not Christ but print, the "inke divinitie." Many of the reformers were aware of such a danger; Hammond even offered the view that "it is true that it hath been printed, that words in a book are images, and consequently to pray before a book, or use a book in prayer, is idolatry, or image worship."^[95] The word, however, came to displace the image, to throw it within the text and so within the mind's eye as figure or rhetorical illustration. Rhetoric became a kind of law, a further object of antirrhetic against the visual insofar as "a simple eye is soon beguiled. It is very coarse wool, that will take no colour. It is a desperate cause, that with words, and eloquence may not be smoothed. Remember of what matters and adversaries thou has to deal. . . . Lay down all affection, and favour of parties. . . . Let reason lead thee: let authority move thee: let Truth enforce thee."^[96] The text, in short, becomes the object of an ever more complex hermeneutics, its meanings or images now become subject to juridically precise protocols of reading and of inward direction, and the governance of perception becomes formalized in the displaced (textual) identity of reason, word, and icon. Similarly, the threat of iconoclasm or of reform moves from image to gloss, from statue to figure, from symbol to sign. The new form of persuasion is the book, the new heresy is rhetoric; indeed, according to the satirical comment of Cornelius Agrippa in De

[94] Perkins, A Warning against Idolatrie at 108–109.

[95] Hammond, Of Idolatry at 34.

[96] Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie at fol. A iv b.

Incertitudine , "orators . . . defenders of idolatry . . . have seduced, rising up against Christ with most great colours of rhetoric, out of whose damnable and blasphemous eloquence, the heretics have taken many arguments or persuasions, which they put into simple mens ears, [and] have led them from the word of truth."^[97]

One fantasm of truth replaces another and a new technology of fascination displaces its predecessor, but the structure or form of law evidences some remarkable continuities. The issue is that of how the law is best transmitted and retained, according to what passage of the image and by means of which form of custody. The image, like writing, served as an external mark or reminder not only of things past or absent but also of the affections or desires that were associated with absence, with the past, and with its histories. Images were "an inward book" to be read backward through memory and internal imagination. For the defenders of the image it was not difficult to argue both its greater power and also its many pragmatic advantages over the word. It was closer to its source and free of all need for interpretation: the image takes the place of the orator and forms a more direct inward picture than can be achieved through words, whether printed or spoken. Words require translation or "change of shape" from their textual or auditory form to an inward and visible form. At their most powerful, words are visible, they are images and can be seen, they are uttered to the eyes: "His words were not only heard but even visibly seen. . . . The whole people saw the words (videbat voces )."^[98] For the same reason that the defender recognizes the peculiar power of the image, the reformer challenges and denounces the animation and the impiety of even those images that simply act as spurs of memory: they are corrupt and kindle affections or excitations of the flesh, they are artificial memories, fantasms which threaten to draw the eye of the spirit toward the corporeality or materiality of the visual object: "For the mind is rapt from heavenly consideration, to the earthly creature: from the soul to the substance, from the heart to the eye."^[99]

The denunciation of the image becomes the model and form for the denunciation of rhetoric or oratory. The antirrhetic moves slowly from one species of attraction or of seduction to the next and it carries with it the same vehemence, a comparable fury—because both image and textual figure are visible forms—and a similar force of correction or of law. The antirrhetic seeks to secure the foundations of law and to expel those images which threaten the truth by imagination or superstition, by phantasms of

[97] Agrippa, De Incertitudine at sig. 20r.

[98] Sander, A Treatise of the Images at 162.

[99] Calfhill, An Answere to the Treatise of the Cross at sig. 6r; see also William Perkins, Art of Prophesying , in William Perkins, Work of William Perkins (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1603, 1970 ed.) at 344.

the mind that have no foundation either in essence or in existence.^[100] The antirrhetic moves on but it carries with it a hatred of the image in all its forms of appearance, it carries with it the misogyny that would endlessly seek to institutionalize contingency, to standardize particularity, and to subordinate the plurality and poetry of imagination to the uniformity and universality of reason.^[101] Transmission is the form of law and it struggles constantly to control the direction and the termination, the destiny, of subjective vision or internal images. Its reason denies the worth of an interiority that does not conform to the laws of thought: where the image could be labeled idolatrous for confusing the medium or surface with the substance and for attributing significance to a thing without being or essence, the new antirrhetic of the post-Reformation era would similarly denounce "pseudologia," or false, even idolatrous words. Such language was imagistic in that it threatened reason and the laws of thought, it brought words of false doctrine which were as evil as images and indeed indistinguishable from images in their effects save that they came in the guise not of vision but of philosophy. Rhetoric and particularly a rhetoric that laid claim to truth was the new idolatry of the modern age. It was heresy in a secular form:

Beware of him, that endeavours to prove his false doctrine versutis disputationibus, by subtle and crafty reasonings. . . . Beware that no man spoil [depraedetur ] you through philosophy and vain deceit. . . . For these heretics put all the force of their poisons in logike, or dialectical disputation, which by the opinion of philosophers is defined to have power not to prove, but an earnest desire to destroy and disprove . . . by guileful logic.^[102]

The antirrhetic not only endeavors to impose a law of thought, it aims to institute a being or reason of a highly specific kind. The subject of the antirrhetic, the legal subject, is defined by its antagonisms, identified by its exclusions, and fascinated—motivated—by the fantasm of a cold and enduring reason, a science, which forbids all images and so denies the power of all other laws. The subject of the antirrhetic is bound internally to law by an image of a univocal, singular, and literal reason, by the fantasy of a victory over "false imaginings," by a law of thought that begins from the knowledge that "idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another."^[103]

[100] Godden, Catholicks no Idolaters at 20.

[101] Specifically on the theme of femininity and image over the longue durée, see J-J. Goux, Les Iconoclastes at 191 et seq.; Debray, Vie et mort de l'image at 77 et seq; Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) at 31–49.

[102] Harding, Confutation at sig. 32v–33r.

[103] John Selden, Table Talk (London: E. Smith, 1689) at 23.