Idolatry

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Idolatry is the worship of an image, an object, or a created thing as though it were divine — and, more sharply, the name a tradition gives to the worship it judges false. The word comes from the Greek eidōlon, an image or phantom, joined to latreia, service or worship: literally, the service of images. It is rarely a charge anyone has claimed for themselves. From the start it has been something said about other people’s gods.

The concept is native to the Hebrew Bible, where the demand that Israel worship one God alone carries with it a prohibition on the rest. The commandment against graven images forbids the making and bowing-down to them; the narrative of the golden calf, cast while Moses is still on the mountain, is its founding breach. The prophets return to the theme relentlessly, mocking the idol as wood the same hand has used for firewood, and naming the foreign gods directly — Baal, the storm-god of Canaan, and the deities of Babylon among them. What the texts condemn is not always clear to modern readers: sometimes the worship of other gods, sometimes the worship of the true God through a forbidden image, two errors the sources do not always separate.

Christianity inherited the prohibition and then complicated it. The early church read pagan sacrifice as idolatry and refused it at the cost of martyrdom; yet as Christian art developed, the question turned inward. The Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries split the Eastern church over whether icons of Christ and the saints were holy aids or forbidden idols. The defenders, whose position the Second Council of Nicaea affirmed in 787, drew a distinction that has carried weight ever since: between latreia, the worship owed to God alone, and the lesser veneration that passes through an image to its prototype. The Reformation reopened the wound in the West, and reforming crowds stripped and smashed church images as idols in the name of the same commandment.

Islam took the firmest line. The central sin in the Qur’anic vocabulary is shirk, the association of partners with God, and the destruction of the idols of the Kaʿba stands at the origin of the Muslim community; the resulting aniconism shaped a whole civilization’s art away from the divine image.

Scholarship has grown wary of the word as a neutral description. Idolatry, on a common modern reading, is less a thing some people do than a category one religion builds to mark the boundary of its own — so that the history of the charge is also a history of how monotheism imagined its rivals. The traditions that leveled it, of course, understood it otherwise: as the plainest of errors, mistaking the made thing for its maker. The disagreement is old, and it turns on a question none of the parties treats as small — what, exactly, is owed to God, and what is stolen from him when it is given to anything else.

→ Related: Heresy · Excommunication · Baal · Marduk · Jehovah