Aniconism

Aniconism is the absence of material representations of the natural and supernatural world in various cultures, particularly in the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. It may extend from only God and deities to saint characters, all living beings, and everything that exists. The phenomenon is generally codified by the religious traditions and as such becomes a taboo. When enforced by the physical destruction of images, aniconism becomes iconoclasm. The word itself derives from Greek εικων 'image' with the negative prefix an- (Greek privative alpha) and the suffix -ism (Greek -ισμος).

Monotheist religions – Aniconism was shaped in monotheist religions by theological considerations and historical contexts. It emerged as a corollary of seeing God's position as the ultimate power holder, and the need to defend this unique status against competing external and internal forces, such as pagan idols and critical humans. Idolatry was seen as a threat to uniqueness, and one way that prophets and missionaries chose to fight it was through the prohibition of physical representations. The same solution worked against the pretension of humans to have the same power of creation as God (hence their banishment from the Heavens, the destruction of Babel, and the Second Commandment in the biblical texts).

Aniconism as a construction – Some modern scholars, working on various cultures, have gathered material showing that the idea of aniconism is in many cases an intellectual construction, suiting specific intents and historical contexts, rather than a fact of the tangible reality (Huntington for Buddhism, Clément for Islam and Bland for Judaism – see below in notes and references).

Buddhist art used to be aniconic: the Buddha was represented only through his symbols (an empty throne, the Bodhi tree, the Buddha's footprints, the prayer wheel). This reluctance toward anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha, and the sophisticated development of aniconic symbols to avoid it (even in narrative scenes where other human figures would appear), seem to be connected to one of the Buddha's sayings, reported in the Digha Nikaya, that discouraged representations of himself after the extinction of his body. Although there is still some debate, the first anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha himself are often considered a result of the Greco-Buddhist interaction.

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