Talk:Iconoclasm

Non-notable

 * It is appropriate for me to quote here what Swami Vivekananda said about the lesson of medieval iconoclasm in India’s history. ‘Temple after temple was broken down by the foreign conqueror, but no sooner had the wave passed than the spire of the temple rose up again. Some of these old temples of South India, and those like Somnath in Gujarat, will teach you volumes of wisdom, which will give you a keener insight into the history of the race than any amount of books. Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and a hundred regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever! That is the national mind, that is the national life-current. Follow it and it leads to glory.’
 * L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008). ISBN 978-81-291-1363-4


 * And, above all, don't let us forget India, the cradle of the human race, or at least of that part of it to which we belong, where first Mohammedans, and then Christians, were most cruelly infuriated against the adherents of the original faith of mankind. The destruction or disfigurement of the ancient temples and idols, a lamentable, mischievous and barbarous act, still bears witness to the monotheistic fury of the Mohammedans, carried on from Mahmud the Ghaznevid of cursed memory down to Aureng Zeb, the fratricide, whom the Portuguese Christians have zealously imitated by destruction of temples and the auto da fe of the inquisition at Goa.
 * Arthur Schopenhauer The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer - Translated By T. Bailey Saunders


 * Not satisfied with this, after entering Peking, Lord Elgin ordered the burning of the Summer Palace `whose splendours' the conquerors themselves had `found it difficult to describe'. This action Elgin in his ignorance had imagined would impress the Oriental and leave a lasting fear of the European in the Chinese mind. By a strange process of reasoning, the Europeans have, throughout their relations with Asians, convinced themselves that acts of savagery and inhumanity will increase their prestige in the eyes of Asian people. ... The Elgins have been unfortunate in their historical imagination- — whether it be in respect of Greek marbles or Chinese palaces.
 * Panikkar, K. M. (1953). Asia and Western dominance, a survey of the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498-1945, by K.M. Panikkar. London: G. Allen and Unwin.


 * We now realize that the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas itself was a loud warning signal to the world of far greater devastation that was on the way.
 * Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence across Time and Tradition, James K. Wellman, Jr.

Encyclopedic, not comprehensible out of context



 * For Egypt, the greatest horror was the destruction or abduction of the cult images. In the eyes of the Israelites, the erection of images meant the destruction of divine presence; in the eyes of the Egyptians, this same effect was attained by the destruction of images. In Egypt, iconoclasm was the most terrible religious crime; in Israel, the most terrible religious crime was idolatry. In this respect Osarseph alias Akhenaten, the iconoclast, and the Golden Calf, the paragon of idolatry, correspond to each other inversely, and it is strange that Aaron could so easily avoid the role of the religious criminal. It is more than probable that these traditions evolved under mutual influence. In this respect, Moses and Akhenaten became, after all, closely related.
 * Jan Assmann, From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change, pg. 76, 2014, The American University in Cairo Press.


 * Now forasmuch, good children, as images be neither necessary nor profitable in our churches and temples, nor were not used at the beginning in Christ's nor the Apostles' time, nor many years after, and that at length they were brought in by bishops of Rome, maugre emperors' teeth; and seeing also, that they be very slanderous to Christ's religion, for by them the name of God is blasphemed among the infidels, Turks, and Jews, which because of our images do call Christian religion, idolatry and worshiping of images: and for as much also, as they have been so wonderfully abused within this realm to the high contumely and dishonor of God, and have been great cause of blindness and of much contention among the King's Majesty's loving subjects and are like so to be still, if they should remain: and chiefly seeing God's word speaketh so much against them, you may hereby right well consider what great causes and ground the King's Majesty had to take them away within his realm, following here in the example of the godly King Hezekias, who brake down the brazen serpent, when he saw it worshiped, and was therefore praised of God, notwithstanding at the first the same was made and set up by God's commandment, and was not only a remembrance of God's benefits, before received, but also a figure of Christ to come. And not only Hezekias, but also Manasses, and Jehosaphat, and Josias, the best kings that were of the Jews, did pull down images in the time of their reign.
 * The Life, Martyrdom, and Selections from the Writings of Thomas Cranmer by Thomas Cranmer, p.139-142, (1809)


 * “At least from 1540 onwards,” writes Dr. T. R. de Souza “and in the island of Goa before that year, all the Hindu idols had been annihilated or had disappeared, all the temples had been destroyed and their sites and building materials were in most cases utilised to erect new Christian churches and chapels.
 * M. D. David (ed.), Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity, Bombay, 1988, p. 17. Quoted in S.R. Goel: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)


 * Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, destroyed its "heathen" monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own. He issued orders to the provincial governors, and to his other subordinates, to raze to the ground all the temples of either Hindus or Christians, to smash every idol, and to close every Hindu school. In one year ( 1679-80) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixty-three at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur; and over the site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in deliberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque.
 * Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, ch. XVI


 * Not satisfied with this, after entering Peking, Lord Elgin ordered the burning of the Summer Palace `whose splendours' the conquerors themselves had `found it difficult to describe'. This action Elgin in his ignorance had imagined would impress the Oriental and leave a lasting fear of the European in the Chinese mind. By a strange process of reasoning, the Europeans have, throughout their relations with Asians, convinced themselves that acts of savagery and inhumanity will increase their prestige in the eyes of Asian people. ... The Elgins have been unfortunate in their historical imagination- — whether it be in respect of Greek marbles or Chinese palaces.
 * Panikkar, K. M. (1953). Asia and Western dominance, a survey of the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498-1945, by K.M. Panikkar. London: G. Allen and Unwin.


 * "Iconoclasm was the central sacrament of the reform," states Eamon Duffy. It is an assertion that is more provocative than strictly accurate, especially in its dismissive use of the term "sacrament" in association with the Anglican Church, but many historians have persuasively presented iconoclastic extemism as a defining factor in the English Reformation. The long struggle over "images" had broad and deep connections with the transformation of English society and the ideologies of selfhood, identity, gender, and sexuality that governed, or as Louis Althusser puts it, "interpleted", men and women into the grand narrative of their culture. Today, some may say the picture of the world advanced by the reformers was maybe no less false, the idolatry of the Word no less pernicious than the idolatry of the Image. Yet Aston confesses that while she believes that historians are "not supposed to take sides," she finds it hard to "sympathize with the reformer's zeal for destruction. Doing without images is one thing, annihilating them is another. Destruction may be exhilierating, but it has an eventual fall-out which is the opposite of life-enhancing."
 * Gary Waller, “The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture”, Cambridge University Press, (Jan 20, 2011), p. 4


 * Iconoclasm frequently has a distinctive misogynic caste - not just the chronically corrosive misogyny of medieval Christianity, which emerged from the struggles of the early Church in which, as Beattie puts it the wrong side too often triumphed to the great detriment of Christianity itself but a distinctive form of masculinity anxiety, a deep-rooted distinctively Protestant misogyny directed at women and female experience.
 * Gary Waller, “The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture”, Cambridge University Press, (Jan 20, 2011), p. 11


 * We now realize that the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas itself was a loud warning signal to the world of far greater devastation that was on the way.
 * Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence across Time and Tradition, James K. Wellman, Jr.


 * The Sultan thus wrote respecting it: - "If any should wish to construct a building equal to this, he would not be able to do it without expending an hundred thousand, thousand red dinars, and it would occupy two hundred years even though the most experienced and able workmen were employed." The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naptha and fire, and levelled with the ground.
 * About Mahmud of Ghazni at Mathura. Kitãbul-Yamînî, in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Vol. II, p.44-45