Holy Week begins, which is that religious holiday that was invented to ensure that it rains in Seville at least once a year, and it does so by viralizing a video on Tik-Tok, Twitter and Facebook of the Virgin of the Dew burning during the procession in the Malaga town of Vélez-Málaga. Two devotees suffered burns to their hands when they tried to put out the flames before the fire extinguishers arrived. The idea of ​​a burning Easter image is terrifying. It is, at least in a conceptual sense, because devotion to religious imagery is what we know as idolatry, icon worship.
The Catholic Church forbids idolatry but invented a cousin, iconoduly, which is prophylactic idolatry by which Rome allowed its people to worship images as long as they did not go beyond considering them a simple representation of the divine and not divine in themselves . To be clear, the Vatican only accepts the divinity of God (in its trinity), so there is no need to attribute any mysticism to a representation of saints, virgins or scenes of the passion of Christ. But he does accept that images, as avatars of the divine, serve for prayer and meditation. In other words, the rule says that an image is prayed to but not worshipped.
In 747, the Second Council of Nicaea was dedicated to discussing these delicate nuances between venerating and adoring, to resolve the issue with the invention of iconoduly, but the resolution was not very conclusive, because even the dictionary does not recognize the word, not very convincing because the discussion of idolatry was one of the causes of the Great Schism or Schism of 1054 between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
If devotion to inanimate art is an anthropological fact that transcends the borders of religions, iconoclasm is no less so, which despises this devotion and destroys icons. There is a very powerful symbolic and political value in both idolatry and iconoclasm, erecting statues is as significant a political act as bringing them down. In fact, the skeptical thinker David Rieff considered that for a society to transition from one political model to another, an iconoclastic purge is necessary. That’s how we saw the statues of Lenin or Saddam Hussein fall, and that’s how the galloping dictator Francisco Franco’s statues disappeared from our streets and squares.
This anthropological substance explains our fascination with sequences like the one yesterday in Vélez-Málaga, where the rapture of the procession intersects with the destructive passion of fire. This sin was committed by the screenwriter of Mission Impossible II, Robert Towne, who brought his protagonist, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), to Spain to attend a party that was the Sevillian Holy Week with cremà and Valencian falleras. He received many reproaches and ridicule, perhaps for not admitting that in his heresy he had synthesized our fickle passions, as ready for worship as for detriment.
