‘이미지 이데올로기’ 측면에서 8세기 성화상 논쟁의 발단원인 고찰

This paper is a study on two themes of historiography and philosophy regarding iconoclastic controversy. In this respect, this study has uniqueness differentiated from the existing studies. The objective of this study is to identify the cause of iconoclastic controversy in the 8th-century Byzantine era from the ‘image ideology’ perspective. Most studies on iconoclastic controversy that’d been conducted so far focused largely on external factors for sparking off controversy, whereas this study focused on revealing internal factors. To seek quality, this study made a new concept of ‘image ideology’ independently and used it as analysis tool. ‘Image ideology’ is an analysis system that contains ‘ideology as an attribute of image’ and ‘ideology as an attribute of image of image.’ This is based on the idea that image essentially contains ideology. As a result of determining the cause of iconoclastic controversy from the image ideology perspective, it was revealed that the iconoclastic controversy in the 8th-century Byzantine era was caused by image ideology conflict between Leo Ⅲ(717-41 in reign) who led iconoclasm and Gregorius Ⅱ (715-31 in reign) who advocated iconolatry. Leo Ⅲ used the image of icon as ideological tool to achieve his political end of ‘Caesaro-papism’ and Gregorius Ⅱ to achieve his political end of ‘Papo-caesarism.’ The image discourse in Christianity started from the iconoclastic controversy in the 8th-century Byzantine era did not just remain as theological discussion today, but became a meta-discourse when it was connected with ideologies in such different areas as politics, economy, society, culture, art, and idea. This is an inevitable logical conclusion from the perspective of this study that ideology is an attribute of image. In this time and situation, this study is significant in that it provided a new analysis framework for iconoclastic controversy theoretically and promoted awareness of image ideology for Korean churches politically.