The ubiquitous concern with visual representation and visual paradigms in late antiquity has been the focus of a great deal of scholarship, in various disciplines, in recent years. One aspect of this phenomenon is the profound concern among writers of the second to fourth centuries to determine the nature of the relationship between divine beings and their images. Pagan writers and thinkers of this period, men who can hardly be described as idolaters, devote extensive energy to this problem, including Callistratus, Dio, Julian, Maximus of Tyre, Philostratus, Plotinus, and Porphyry. Christian writers, including Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix, and Athanasius, likewise concern themselves with images and the divine, reflecting the concerns of their pagan counterparts, but also turning these concerns against their opponenets in making images the haunts of demons, and manifesting a particular concern for the “true” image of God, found variously in Christ, the Christian him or herself, or the soul. In the brief time available, this communication will highlight this concern with the visual and the divine, illustrating the cultural and intellectual commonalities between pagans and Christians and their embeddedness in a common milieu which, contrary to outmoded concepts of pagan idolatry and Christian aniconism, insisted that gods or God must have a genuine visible manifestation.
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