When does an image become a god? early Christian apologist Minucius Felix had an answer. A log cut, is hewn, is planed, and is still no A stone sculptured, and is polished by some abandoned and still is no A sculpture set up, and even yet it is not a god. But, lo, it is adorned, it is consecrated, it is prayed to-then at length it is a god, when man has chosen it to be so, and for purpose has dedicated it.1If only it were that easy. Felix offered just half of story as David Freedberg has argued. Veneration does not produce that unhealthy power that idols exert over attentive viewer. Rather, opposite is true: idols are venerated because they exert this power. All images seem to contain at least traces of it. They draw our eye with ineluctable command, and force themselves on our attention. image is just a representation, of course. It has been made by humans and can only ever gesture to an absent presence. And yet, images are also effective. Their ability to move us depends on the possibility of fusion between image and prototype. crucifix is always only wood or stone, its power comes from what might be called, with Freedberg, a sacred contagion that penetrates from behind veil of representation. Indeed, its value as a religious object depends on this contagion. Worshipers know that those tears shed by Virgin in anguish at Christ's broken body are, in reality, just paint over mute stone and wood. Nevertheless, they are moved by those specks of material. If not, why have a statue in first place? The miraculous object has an effectiveness that proceeds as if original body were present, Freedberg notes, but difficulty lies in cognitively grasping that 'as if.' 2 Men do not choose to invest images with power over their imaginations and intellects. Even before images are prayed to, before they are consecrated, they already have that power.Whatever one thinks of phenomenology of images, there is no doubt that this super-human power of idols obsessed many people in early modern period. An object that had no power to inspire attention and devotion was hardly a threat, after all. enormous waves of iconoclasm that swept across Europe-Germany in 1520s, Scotland in late 1550s, Netherlands in 1560s, England in 1640s-were not directed at decorative tiles, pews, or doorstops. They were directed exactly at those things that made devout feel presence of divine. And no one was quicker to identify these powerful images than breakers themselves, who, in their extreme acts of rage, confirmed effects that these supposedly dead bits of wood and stone exerted over them. man in UIm in 1534 who defecated into the mouth of an effigy of Christ demonstrated his extreme revulsion at what was, in reality, merely a lump of brute material.3 Perhaps, if asked, he would have insisted that his scatological exuberance was designed to show definitively impotence of idol, one wonders, then, why he would not simply cover it with a bag, or wheel it away into some nearby stable.Minucius Felix's vision of impotent wood and stone looks less like a description of a fact, then, and more like an effort at persuasion. It was same effort made by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians when, after berating his wayward congregation, he assures them that we know that an idol is nothing in world, and that there is none other one.4 Felix and Paul alike were engaged in polemics of demystification, trying to convince their skeptical listeners that religious objects they venerate were, in fact, just And it was Paul who berated Greeks for their superstitious worship of nothing. At altar of unknown God, Paul revealed to them that behind their nothing dwelt God that made world and all things therein, who is not worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing. …