Does the “books of the illiterate” defence support the veneration of images?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — as a defence of the lawful making and keeping of images for instruction, Gregory the Great's rationale is sound and was the settled Western position for centuries; but as support for the veneration cult — bowing, kissing, lights, incense, the honour that “passes to the prototype” — it is weak, because the same letters in which Gregory defends images expressly and repeatedly forbid adoring them. The “books of the illiterate” formula licenses a didactic and affective use of images, not the icon-cult the Second Council of Nicaea would dogmatize; it is a genuinely different and lesser defence than the Eastern veneration theology. · classic proponent (of the didactic defence): Gregory the Great; the veneration-reading is a later apologetic appropriation of him.

The claim

— Gregory the Great, Register of Epistles XI.10, to Serenus of Marseilles. The argument, as commonly marshalled, is that Gregory — the pope who sent the mission to the English, a father of the Western church — defended Christian images against a bishop who was destroying them, and so stands as early patristic authority for the church's use, and by extension its veneration, of images. The formula “a picture is instead of reading” (later, “the books of the illiterate”) is cited as the West's charter for sacred art.¹

Who advances it

The source is Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), in two letters (599 and 600) to Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, who had smashed the images in his church on finding people adoring them. The interpretation weighed here — that these letters underwrite image-veneration — is a later apologetic use of Gregory, common where the two texts are quoted as proof that a Roman pope “defended images.” It must be distinguished from what Gregory himself argues, which is narrower. The distinctively Western position Gregory states here — images for teaching, adoration forbidden — would remain the Latin default long after the Greek East had moved to a developed veneration theology; the Frankish Libri Carolini and the Synod of Frankfurt (794) held essentially Gregory's line against the Second Council of Nicaea.²

The evidence for (steelmanned)

Gregory really does defend images, and against an iconoclast. This is not a case of an image-friendly text read tendentiously. Serenus is a bishop destroying images, and Gregory twice rebukes him for it, commanding that the images be preserved and even that anyone who wishes to make more be freely permitted: “if any one should wish to make images, by no means prohibit him.” So the earliest firm papal ruling on the question comes down for keeping images in churches, against their destruction. That much of the veneration party's appeal to Gregory is solid.³

Gregory allows images to feed devotion, not only to instruct. The strongest form of the pro-veneration reading does not rest only on the teaching-function. Gregory adds that from “the sight of the event portrayed” the faithful should “catch the ardour of compunction, and bow themselves down in adoration of the One Almighty Holy Trinity.” The image is thus not a bare textbook but a spur to worship — it kindles devotion and occasions the act of adoration. A defender of veneration can press that this is the germ of the later principle: the image is honoured in that the sight of it moves the heart Godward, and the worship it triggers is directed through the depicted event to God. On this reading Gregory is at least on the road toward the icon.⁴

Adversarial assessment

Gregory forbids adoring the image, in the very texts adduced. The steelman breaks on the letters themselves. Gregory does not merely fail to teach veneration; he condemns it. He praises Serenus's zeal “against anything made with hands being an object of adoration” and faults him only for the smashing: “in that thou forbadest them to be adored, we altogether praise thee; but we blame thee for having broken them.” His remedy for Serenus's divided flock is to teach them from Scripture “that it is not lawful for anything made with hands to be adored, since it is written, Thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Luke 4:8). And his standing rule is the plainest possible: make images freely, “but by all means forbid the adoration of images.” The line Gregory draws falls exactly where the Byzantine defence would later insist it need not: at adoration of the image.⁵

The devotional passage terminates on God, never on the image. The affective reading (feature two of the steelman) is real but proves the opposite of what it is enlisted for. Where Gregory lets the image stir devotion, the adoration he sanctions is “adoration of the One Almighty Holy Trinity” — the worship passes to God, prompted by the sight, not to the image or its prototype. Gregory never says the honour paid an image “passes to the prototype” (Basil's principle, which the veneration theology needs); he says the image may move the viewer to adore God. That is precisely the distinction the later cult collapses and Gregory keeps open: the image is an occasion of worship, not a recipient of it. Read honestly, the passage is a firewall against veneration of the image, not a doorway to it.⁶

The rationale cannot carry the cult it is cited for. The Second Council of Nicaea (787) defines a concrete practice — icons are to be given “honourable reverence (proskynēsis)” by “kissing and honourable reverence,” with lights and incense, and “he who venerates the image venerates… the person represented in it.” Nothing in Gregory reaches this. His images do a job — they teach the illiterate and stir compunction — and are then explicitly walled off from adoration. A defence whose whole positive content is “pictures instead of reading” plus “forbid adoration” simply does not entail bowing to, kissing, and censing the image; those are the very acts Gregory rules out. As a support for the veneration doctrine the argument therefore does not hold on its best case: its own texts refute the conclusion drawn from them.

Where this leaves the debate. The honest result is a distinction the Protestant–Catholic argument often blurs. Gregory is real, early, Western, and image-friendly — and he is not a witness to veneration; he is a witness to a moderate didactic use of images with adoration expressly barred, a position closer to a mainstream Protestant “images may teach but not be worshipped” than to Nicaea II. The gap between Rome's historic rationale (Gregory, the Libri Carolini, Frankfurt 794) and Byzantium's veneration theology is a real feature of the record, not an apologetic invention. That the West later received Nicaea II and folded its practice into the veneration framework is a development to be argued on other grounds; it cannot be read back into Gregory, whose letters cut the other way.⁷

Assessment

Weak. As authority for the church's use of images — that they may lawfully be made, kept, and set in churches to teach the unlettered and stir devotion — Gregory's letters are strong, and they were the operative Western rule for centuries. But that is not the claim on trial. As support for the veneration of images — the icon-cult of Nicaea II, in which the image is bowed to, kissed, and censed and the honour passes to its prototype — the “books of the illiterate” defence is weak, because Gregory forbids adoration of the image in the same breath in which he defends the image, and the only adoration he sanctions is of the Trinity. The argument fails not on a technicality but at its core: the texts adduced for veneration are, read whole, a prohibition of it. This does not make Gregory an iconoclast — he rebukes the man who smashed the images — but it makes him a witness to a third position, the moderate Western didactic view, distinct from both Byzantine veneration and Reformed image-breaking. The value of the finding is exactly that distinction: on the proof-text most often cited to close the gap between Rome and Byzantium, the gap is real.