I would love to agree with this, but can’t quite. All iconoclasm is not alike. Reading Fraser’s essay I found myself remembering Mikhail Bakhtin’s great essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in which he compares ancient and medieval parody with its modern equivalent.
Ancient parody was free of any nihilistic denial. It was not, after all, the heroes who were parodied, nor the Trojan War and its participants; what was parodied was only its epic heroization; not Hercules and his exploits but their tragic heroization. The genre itself, the style, the language are all put in cheerfully irreverent quotation marks, and they are perceived against a backdrop of contradictory reality that cannot be confined within their narrow frames. The direct and serious word was revealed, in all its limitations and insufficiency, only after it had become the laughing image of that word ”” but it was by no means discredited in the process.
By contrast, “in modern times the functions of parody are narrow and unproductive. Parody has grown sickly, its place in modem literature is insignificant. We live, write and speak today in a world of free and democratized language: the complex and multi-leveled hierarchy of discourses, forms, images, styles that used to permeate the entire system of official language and linguistic consciousness was swept away by the linguistic revolution of the Renaissance.” Parody for us is too often merely iconoclastic, breaking images out of juvenile delight in breaking, not out of commitment to a reality too heteroglot (Bakhtin’s term) to fit within the confines of standardized religious practices. I think Charlie Hebdo is juvenile in this way.
“All iconoclasm is not alike.†Indeed! For in an important sense, the Christian God is the ultimate iconoclast. That said, vital qualifications also need to be said.
The reason for this rests not only upon the identity and nature of the “God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christâ€, the Singular “I am†of the Hebrew scriptures, but also upon the nature and identity of the human. Humans are irreducibly created creatures, and yet created “in the image and likeness†of this very God.
Not only does such a complex view of reality give rise to prohibitions of murder, and so repulsion at the killing of the 12 [i]chez Charlie Hebdo[/i], but also repulsion at the kinds of puerile parody Jacobs rightly highlights.
The basic problem of the now secularized cry of [i]libert̩, ̩galit̩, fraternit̩[/i] is that it simply cannot account for this subtle form of understanding reality, especially human reality. Autonomous human being is itself but a mere idol, one that will eventually only undo itself. For it can only be a parody of the genuinely human Рhumanity [i]coram Deo[/i], and moreover the triune God of the Christian Tradition. Only in these ways may both the first three Commandments be honored as well as the sixth.
In the end, it is not a case of “Je suis Charlieâ€, but of “Jesus vs. Charlieâ€, where Jesus is both the Crucified Messiah and Image of God.