When I visit our grandchildren, I appreciate both how closely related they are and yet how different they can be from each other. Their life path will not replicate what they perceive, wrongly or rightly, to be an image of life that parents and others hold for them. More broadly, neither will they, I hope, succumb to the tyranny of images and become imitators or copyists. To help me think about the marvelous difference that exists between all human beings and the danger of reducing it to genetic chains, I bring up two short texts that come to us across nearly two millennia.
The first one is a passage from the Mishnah Sanhedrin, written by the end of the second century of our era, where the basic oneness of human nature, symbolized by the minting of coins, is contrasted with the extraordinary variety of people. I quote:
Human beings were created as individuals, to teach that whoever destroys one soul, it is as if a complete world was destroyed, and whoever sustains one soul, it is as if a whole world was sustained. [….] For coins are made by being struck with a die, and yet they all resemble each other. But the Divine One struck each human being with the die of the first person, yet none resembles the other. (Danby, The Mishnah).
The die or seal used for the “first person” produces a different image each and every time, yet there is but one “die”, used an infinite number of times. In contrast, mints had to replace metallic dies because these wore out after a few thousand of strikes. And yet the coins retained the same imagery throughout the series. The expected uniformity of the coins, in turn, made the task of governing, taxing, and controlling people that much easier. In sharp contrast to this use of uniformity for consolidating power, the divine agent, we are told, is willing to relinquish control and have images of self that can be very different from each other, with value in and of themselves.
In a second text that portrays Jesus, the same elements are at play: a divinity, earthly kings, a coin, and the business of images (Mark 12:13–17; Matthew 22:15–22; Luke 20:20–26). Jesus is at the temple in Jerusalem, confronted by Pharisees and Herodians, i.e. the government’s critics and representatives of the time, who colluded to ask him a trick question: “Is it lawful to pay the census to Caesar or not?” In response, he requests a silver coin, which he lacks, because of poverty or religious piety, and then asks whose image and inscription the coin bears. Does he even look at it? When he is told that they belong to Caesar, he answers: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” a famous answer often used to support various degrees of separation of church and state, as if the two spheres were different actors in the political drama that repeatedly plays itself out. The immediate point of the answer, however, is about the nature and limits of power. There were boundaries even to the powers of a Caesar, most especially in regard to the sameness of the images and their capacity to make people believe that they were a full extension of his presence everywhere rather than an ersatz of it. He could have statues and coins copy his picture and be distributed at the limits of his military power, but those images could never replace him, whereas the divine imageless presence could be detected everywhere, past and beyond the great variety of nature and human beings.
These two ancient texts have something to say regarding the modern situation. We live in a world where the power to print or coin images on matter and claim the product for oneself as a private good has exploded. This capacity is more extensive than ever before and goes beyond the so-called tragedy of the commons. It reaches into the plant, animal and human domains. Copyright law, so extensive now since 1998 (death + 70 years); Patent law on genetic engineering in 1982… Since 1980, a law passed by Congress allows universities and other non-profit organizations to patent discoveries made with financial assistance from public sources. It has encouraged the profit motive among scientists, and led them to work with private sector entrepreneurs, both developments that are troublesome. Modern institutions and corporations are putting their own image and brand even on the stuff of life, which one would have thought could never be owned again.
Our world is not so different from that of antiquity in that the wondrous power of image-making is being abused, just as it was in ancient times. It is not intellectual curiosity itself that is at fault, but how it is controlled and used. We are buying these images, while working as hard as ever to pay for health, for genetically engineered and patented foods, for software, for energy, for education….