The Fear of Imagery in Plato, the Bible, and the Quran

The creation of graven images is second to only polytheism in the Ten Commandments as the most serious injury a sinful man can bring upon God—and thus himself. It comes before theft, adultery, and even murder. The capacity for man to disrespect God is recognized through this prohibition and the corresponding threat of eternal suffering. This demonstrates God’s fear that his creations are capable of recognizing their agency and ability to create, lest they see themselves as similar or equal to their creator as creators themselves. 

Taken at face value, the notion that God created man “in His own image” seems to undermine the Bible’s emphasis on forbidding graven images by allowing man to see human qualities in God, and thus to be able to create reasonably accurate representations of His image. Indeed, God reveals Himself as an anthropomorphic entity in the same breath He bans graven images when He describes Himself as “a jealous God.” God also shares our human senses and needs: He sees, hears, talks, breathes, and rests throughout His creation of man and earth. However, the true purpose of revealing these anthropomorphic qualities is explained in the New Testament when the Jews ask Jesus whether they should pay taxes to the Romans. Jesus tells them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Jesus explains that the coins they carry are printed with Caesar’s image and therefore belong to him— implying that anything bearing its creator’s likeness belongs to the creator. Creating man in his God’s image then gives humans the same sense of worth and power over God’s other creations in the same way that Caesar’s likeness gave Roman coins value and power over other coinage. In both cases, the inherent value of these creations is inextricable from the likeness they bear of their creator, connoting a paternal sense of ownership via likeness. As Professor Robert Segal explains, “the difference between God and humans is a difference of degree, not of kind.”¹ Like parent and child, God’s authority over His creations depends entirely on a constant effort to present His attributes as innately superlative—therefore making the gap that separates man from his creator appear unassailable. Humans must bear God’s likeness for Him to claim ownership of them, so it follows that if humans can make images of God, they can own Him—He is a creation of man. This is God’s biggest fear: that man recognizes their capacity to create to the extent that they believe they created God. The prohibition of graven images, therefore, comes from God’s fear that He would “lose his uniqueness in the process of representation,” thus diminishing his value with every material, man-made reproduction that bridges the divide between the creator and his creations. 

There is something, therefore, about images that make them more powerful in their absence than in abundance. Caesar, in order to make his authority known, could have had his image carved onto every state-owned surface in his empire. The consequence of such abundant reproductions, however, would be that his image would lose the inherent value associated with rarity. Roman coins had authentic value because Caesar had essentially exclusive ownership of his image, providing him with a certain distance from his subjects and authority over them. 

The political use of rare images to suggest divinity brings mortal men like Caesar within what some consider a blasphemous proximity to God. If coinage bearing an image of Caesar gives the coins themselves a venerable quality and power over other currencies by mere association, then there is a real possibility that Caesar’s image becomes more powerful than Caesar himself. This fear of substitution is what led early Muslims to prohibit idolatry, which they believe misled people to worship images rather than the divine entity that the image is meant to represent. 

Fears of idol worship are present across Abrahamic traditions and texts, but nowhere is there more explicitly condemnatory of idolatry and substitution than in the Quran. In the Bible, it is clear that God has an image—but to represent his image is prohibited. In contrast, the Quran characterizes Allah as the “originator of the heavens and the earth . . . [there is] nothing like a likeness of Him.”² Unlike the Christian God, who has anthropomorphic qualities and made man in his own image, Allah has neither a physical form nor likeness that can—nor should—be comprehended by man. As Allah says Himself, “Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth.”³ Man, therefore, need not be in Allah’s image to be His property—nor does Allah need to have any anthropomorphic quality to be man’s creator. To try and replicate Him within the human frame of reference He transcends would be an insulting diminution of Allah’s power and beauty, which cannot be understood, let alone represented, by humans in its entirety. Any creation of an idol or image representing Allah, therefore, is particularly sinful as it not only leads to idol worship, but idol worship of a representation that is insulting to Allah in its failure to capture His characteristically unfathomable likeness. Thus, as opposed to Christianity, the gap that separates the creator from his creations is insurmountable in Islam as all men— from Caesar to his slaves— have a likeness that can be represented while Allah alone transcends depiction. This innate incomprehensibility is made sense of in Chapter 21 of the Quran, in which “[Abraham] said to his father and his people: ‘What are these images to whose worship you cleave?’ They said: ‘We found our fathers worshiping them.’ He said: ‘Certainly you have been, you and your fathers, in manifest error.”⁴ It is from this passage that Muslims extracted the belief that the creation of graven images is a dangerous catalyst for false worship. Like the Bible, the Quran explains that “there is no deity except [Allah], the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of [all] existence.”⁵ To worship an idol or image, therefore, is to worship something comprehensible to man and therefore a materially separate entity from Allah.

The influence of this faith-based prohibition of images and idolatry on human power dynamics is similar to corollary Biblical prohibitions in that such rules are appropriated by political leaders seeking to maintain their power through divine association. The effect of the Quran’s comparatively more absolute banning of representations of Allah, however, led some Muslim leaders to grant only highly exclusive access to their likeness. For example, some Persian kings were never seen by their subjects and only spoke to them from behind an opaque screen to create a sense of insurmountable distance between the king and his people. 

Both the Quran and the Bible make it clear that God’s primary fear is that man realizes his own ability to create to the extent that he sees himself as equally capable of creation as his God. Fear is at the heart of attempts to control, placing the prohibition of graven images and idolatry across the major Abrahamic faiths within the political realm as a means of power. In his Republic, Plato considers the threat images pose to truth within the polis as it relates to state power. In the same way that idols might mislead followers of God or Allah astray by false worship, Plato believes that images are but a copy of copy as they imitate objects, which are themselves imitations of forms. Images, therefore, are “at third remove from the throne of truth.”⁶ In a religious context, truth is held in the form of a genuine belief in God and His word. Plato’s fear regarding images is very similar, but grounded in a different perception of truth: to him, art leads men to take illusions for truth because images are only capable of representing things as they appear to the artist rather than in their original— and thus truthful—form. In other words, the danger of taking images for truth is they are detached from ideas and devoid of meaning. Plato’s allegory of the cave explains the dangerous consequences of believing in imitations: in it, the prisoners are ignorant of the outside world and therefore take the reflections on the cave’s wall as reality rather than the true forms that produce the shadows. The fear embedded in this story is that humans, once convinced that reality consists of mere images, would be unwilling to come out of the cave and unable to derive truth from anything but superficial appearances. Plato’s fears, like those of God, recognize the power of art and images to influence human behavior despite their detachment from original forms. 

From Caesar’s coins to the idols that Abraham’s father worshiped, it is clear that humans derive a sense of power from the knowledge that images suggest to contain. Further, the ability to create and therefore possess such images has a democratizing effect on knowledge—albeit it is perceived or surface-level, according to Plato—that lends itself to the democratization of power. If there is nothing beyond comprehension via representation, then there is no one person or deity that can claim power by way of superior and exclusive knowledge—even of their own abstract likeness. 

So, what has changed? Why have images become not only incomprehensibly abundant, but a societally accepted—if not preferred—medium for truth? Plato’s perspective on the danger of images ultimately becomes the grounds upon which both his and God’s worst fears are recognized: in accepting representations as reality, man realized their ability to both create and lay claim to their creations just as God did when He created man. The Enlightenment era marked a turning point away from the divine and towards a secular, humanist approach to the pursuit of knowledge—empowering humans to reject supernaturalism and embrace their capacity to shape reality. God was not necessarily abandoned during this transition, but the extent of His power over man was severely undermined: He remained the venerated creator of man and nature, but Enlightenment-era humanism placed the power to derive meaning, value, and knowledge from His creations in nature into the hands of humankind. As a result, the capacity to create lost its faith-based association with paternal ownership as God’s creations became man’s to discover rather than merely evidence of His irreconcilably vast and exclusive power. This limit on the creator’s control over His (and his, in the case of mortals) creations was commonly likened by humanist thinkers of the era to the role of a watchmaker. As Professor Alister McGrath explains, God was thought to have “ . . . constructed a particularly elegant piece of machinery, and made no demands of anyone other than a due recognition of the order and beauty of the creation . . . God created the world, and then left it to function and fend for itself.”⁷ This detachment speaks to a notion of creation that is less about the power of knowledge than it is about the power to give an object meaning and purpose beyond its design—something that a creator cannot do with his own creations. This gives the creation an innately independent quality that its creator can neither rescind nor qualify—a limit of control that can be applied to God’s relationship with man as His creation. A painter is not the creator of nature, but to value nature’s beauty enough to render his perspective on it is to give “due recognition” to its beauty. As the creator of the landscape as it is represented in his painting, the artist himself becomes the creator of something as valuable and truthful as it is original. In this way—and against God’s commandments—it follows that to represent something is to give it value. Just as Caesar’s likeness gave value to Roman coins, representations of nature’s likeness denote that it is real and therefore worthy of rational consideration. The logical conclusion to this humanist line of reasoning is that man’s innate inability to accurately represent God precludes His value. In a rational pursuit of knowledge, that which cannot be seen cannot be proven to exist—let alone carry any reasonable importance or value. 

Although Photoshop and artificial intelligence are actively complicating the assumed veracity of images, visuals allow us to see and therefore rationally believe in the veracity of the reality they represent. The idea that “seeing is believing” is a deeply humanist inclination that also speaks to our own desire to believe that things are generally as they appear. Every image we create reminds us of our capacity to create and shape reality according to our perception. If, for example, a friend takes an unflattering photo of us, we can simply ask them to retake it until we find one that satisfies our perceived—if albeit idealized—self-image. Through images, therefore, we can press rewind and override reality by replacing the unflattering photo with one that better represents how we perceive ourselves and would like to be perceived by others. There is very little about the re-do image that betrays reality—we are in the same place, at the same time, doing roughly the same thing we were doing in the unflattering first take—only now, we are aware of the camera, and can use it to represent ourselves in a way that is true to our perception of ourselves. At the same time, since many of the images we create are faithful to our perception of the world as it appears to us, we are often erroneously quick to assume that images taken by others are equally faithful to reality lest we call into question our own ability to accurately represent and thus give meaning to reality. Taken a step further, images allow us to imagine an improved or perfected reality that doesn’t actually exist—it only appears to be real through visual representation 

Social media, for example, exists as a medium for self-curation: through every image we post, we create a verisimilar yet highly idealized representation of our lives that is contingent on the shared belief that images are accurate portrayals of reality. A highly depressed person who only posts pictures of themselves smiling will likely be perceived by others as a happy person. This carefully crafted curation of joyful images might, in turn, provide the user with a surrogate source of happiness since they provide aspirational evidence for their capacity to become happy. In this case, we celebrate images as a medium for their technical ability to indulge our imagination through representation, allowing us to create an aspirational image of our dream reality. Simultaneously, however, such images force us to grapple with both the undesirable reality of our condition and the fictitiousness of the reality we create for ourselves through representation. It follows that the depressed social media user, conscious of their dire mental state and recognizing the discrepancy between their images and their condition, might begin to question the authenticity of the images posted by others. To accept or act upon this doubt, however, is to forfeit the aspirational validity of the happy-go-lucky self-image the user has created for themselves through visual representations. In other words, to openly cast doubt on things as they appear according to others is to invite doubt upon one’s own perception of and ability to create reality. If seeing is believing, the depressed user who feels unsatisfied with their circumstances may become more fixated on visually curating the appearance of happiness rather than finding happiness in their real life. Happiness, therefore, is never actually achieved by the depressed user—only the appearance of happiness can be achieved when one relies on representations of reality. 

As we assign value and meaning to representations, we risk falling into the idol worship cautioned against in religious texts like the Bible and the Quran. However, it is perhaps this very illusion of control—first embodied by divine Abrahamic entities—that makes images so popular today. Perhaps, like God, we fail to truly relinquish control over the realities we create through images that innately and thus inevitably fail to entirely capture the authentic likeness of that which we seek to make real through images. Even though we treat them as such, it seems that representations are inherently disconnected from both their creators and a sense of objective reality—making us no different from God as our creator nor from the products of our realized capacity to create as we were created.

1. Robert A. Segal, “The Blurry Line Between Humans and Gods,” Numen 60, no. 1 (2013): 40.
2. 42:11.
3. Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:255.
4. 21:52-54.
5. Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:255.
6. Plato, The Republic, trans. Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee and Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee (Penguin Books, 2003), 363.
7. Alister McGrath, “The Clockwork God: Isaac Newton and the Mechanical Universe,” Gresham College, January 23, 2018.