Every year, thousands of people from across the world come together
at a single spot in rural Cambodia.
It's the spring equinox,
and they're here to witness an extraordinary sight.
The moment when the sun rises over the central spire
at the temple of Angkor Wat.
I don't usually think of myself as a pilgrim
but this morning I got up well before dawn with
thousands of others to come to see the sun at Angkor Wat.
Certainly, when the sun seemed to balance for a second or two
on top of the central tower of the temple,
there were gasps of amazement and wonderment.
It's religious art at its most spectacular.
It's show stopping.
But the spectacle of Angkor Wat doesn't stop there.
Built by the kings of the Khmer empire in the 12th century,
Angkor is intended to give concrete form
to the claims of Hindu religion.
Five high towers are said to represent the mythical Mount Meru,
centre of the cosmos.
Religious patterns and symbols adorn the walls.
And a seemingly endless narrative frieze
is wrapped around the centre of the temple.
Angkor Wat is one of the biggest
and best-known religious monuments in the world.
When you look at the sculpture
and the decorative patterns on the walls, the extravagant,
in-your-face superfluity of it all, the sheer excess...
..the basic point is clear that this is a building
designed to unify the natural, the human and the divine worlds.
For millennia, art has been used to bring the human and divine together.
And it's given us some of the most majestic
and affecting visual images ever made.
I want to explore what really lies behind
these extraordinary creations.
And reveal the kind of religious work that art does
all around the world.
But, for me, the story of religious art is about more than this.
It's about controversy and conflict,
danger and risk.
Whether it's Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Jewish,
I want to expose the dilemmas that all religions face
when they try to make gods visible in the human world.
When does the worship of an image turn into dangerous idolatry?
Where does divine glorification end and worldly vanity begin?
What actually counts as an image of God or of God's word?
Treading these fault lines, I'll even show how the defacement
of religious art is fraught with its own problems and paradoxes,
and I want to end on what we often think of
as the cradle of Western civilisation itself
to ask what it is we now worship
and how far we still look with the eye of faith.
"There are gods, gods everywhere. And nowhere left to put my feet."
Those are the words of a 12th century Indian poet, as he cast
his eyes on the mass of religious images that surrounded him.
Several centuries on, you can still see what he meant.
Coming to a place I'm not so familiar with, like India,
helps to open my eyes to the fact that religious art gets everywhere.
You don't only find it in churches, temples and galleries.
Religion has always brought out the artfulness in people,
on the body, in the home, and on the street.
And it can seem quite simple,
whether it's a matter of religious awe, or a way of satisfying
our curiosity by peeking into the hidden world of the divine.
But if we go a bit deeper
and try to explore how these religious images actually work...
..it turns out to be a little harder than you might think.
It was 1906 when the artist-explorer Christiana Herringham
was trekking through this remote part of central India.
She had been intrigued by stories of an ancient religious site
long hidden in the hills.
And, after weeks of very rough travel,
she was astounded by what she saw.
Spanning an entire rock face were the Ajanta Caves.
This network of Buddhist prayer holes
and monasteries was begun around 200 BC
and added to over the centuries.
Gradually, hundreds of sculptures
and reliefs of the Buddha were carved out of the rock.
But what Herringham really wanted to find
lay inside the caves themselves.
These are some of the earliest Buddhist paintings in the world.
By then in a perilous state, Herringham set about recording them
before they finally faded away.
This amazing book is how she preserved the paintings.
You've got a preliminary set of essays,
talking about how the work was done and what the paintings meant.
But then the most gorgeous colour plates.
But Herringham not only preserved these scenes
from the life of the Buddha.
In her mind's eye and on her page,
she radically and problematically reinterpreted them.
When she looks at the colour, the perspective,
the careful lines and composition,
what she sees is the Indian equivalent
of Italian Renaissance art,
and she actually talks about them as frescoes,
and she talks about the caves as a picture gallery.
And, in a way, this book is part of that vision.
By giving you small snapshots and giving you them like this
so that you could, if you wanted to, just put them up on your wall,
as pictures, what this book is doing is it's translating
and Indian Buddhist site...
..into the heritage of world art.
Of course, we now see plenty of religious art
in the safe space of a gallery.
But, to understand how these paintings really work,
we need to look at them in the caves for which they were made.
Almost every surface is painted.
Some still showing traces of vivid colour.
Others have become muted over time.
Over and over again, we see the Buddha as he rejects
the vanities of the world in search of enlightenment.
But this is not an easy read.
The scenes are often in a puzzling order
and many details get lost in the darkness.
But it's partly their fragmentary layout
and their shadowy setting that gives these pictures their meaning.
These paintings made the viewers do religious work.
They demanded that you identify, find and refind for yourself...
..the stories that you probably knew in outline already.
You couldn't come here and be a passive consumer
of religious images.
You had to be an active interpreter of them.
I think there's also a point about the fragmentariness
of religious narration.
These paintings echo, in a way,
the many different versions we have of religious stories.
Their open-endedness, their contradictions,
and their inconsistencies.
And even the lack of light has its part, too.
When you came in here, with your flickering candle trying to
make out what was on the walls, in a way,
that was a perfect metaphor for one kind of religious experience.
The idea that you were searching for the truth,
searching for the faith amidst the darkness.
The images at Ajanta invite their viewers to seek out
the Buddhist message for themselves.
And forge their own path to enlightenment.
But just when the last of these scenes were being painted,
on the other side of the world, religious imagery was being
deployed much more aggressively in religious controversy.
In the 6th century AD,
the marshlands of Italy's Adriatic coast,
which had previously been host to little more than remote
fishing villages, became the front line in an ideological war.
Early Christians who, at this stage,
were certainly not a unified faith...
..argued furiously over fundamental parts of their doctrine.
And, amid this controversy,
they harnessed the power of art in a most forceful way.
Here in Ravenna is the church of San Vitale,
named after a local saint and martyr.
Built in the 540s from the ruins of ancient Roman buildings,
its very fabric is a reminder of the Christian conquest of pagan Rome.
And, throughout the church, every technique has been used
to assert the Christian message and demonstrate its awesome power.
Stories from the Bible tell how the one true God first revealed
himself to humankind.
The image of the Christian emperor, flanked by bishops
and soldiers, expresses the unity of the church, state and military.
And the golden mosaics, the great innovation of early Christian
artists, reflect divine light into the darkness.
But there is one image that dominates the church.
It's the figure of Jesus himself.
And it was he who lay at the heart
of early Christianity's theological battles.
The early centuries of Christianity were not a period
of peace and goodwill. Far from it.
They were torn apart by religious controversy about the nature
and divine essence of Jesus.
There were crucial religious issues at stake.
What was the exact relationship between Jesus and God?
What and where had Jesus been before he was born to Mary?
How could a perfect and indivisible God
give up part of himself to create a son?
And, so - and this was the killer question for many -
were Jesus and God made of the same substance?
Or were they just very like each other?
The mosaics here make a very strong case for the divine status of Jesus,
as if to erode any misunderstanding
because he appears as part of a calculated scheme of images designed
to end the controversy, telling the viewer exactly what to believe.
In perfect alignment are three different aspects of Jesus.
The apse, there's the beardless Jesus, young,
the son of God.
The centre of the ceiling,
there's Jesus as the symbolic lamb of God,
the Jesus who's to be sacrificed on behalf of humanity.
And, at the top of the entrance arch,
there's the older, bearded, all-powerful Jesus,
who's about as indistinguishable as you could get from God the Father.
So, there's a lesson here in seeing Jesus.
And, also, particularly in that last image, a clear steer.
These images are telling us never to doubt the divinity of Jesus Christ.
But elsewhere in the Christian world, and at other times,
images can have some unexpected and just as controversial consequences.
Behind the facades of its palazzian churches,
the city of Venice contains a treasure trove of religious
paintings that remain exactly where they were intended to be seen.
And beyond these walls is one of the most spectacular.
This is the meeting house of a religious brotherhood,
known as the Scuola di San Rocco.
A bit like a Renaissance version of a Rotary Club,
moneyed Phoenicians would meet here to share
in their selfless concern for the poor.
And the paintings that surrounded them
offered reminders of their charitable obligations.
If you look at the scene of the birth of Jesus,
there's no doubt that's happening in poverty.
And if you look at the Last Supper,
the most prominent figures in the canvas in front of Jesus
and the disciples are actually two beggars and a dog...
..who's presumably looking for some scraps from the table.
Most of the artwork we now see was produced in the 16th century
and the man responsible was Jacopo Tintoretto.
A home-grown Venetian favourite,
he spent years decorating
the meeting house with over 50 paintings.
And his most famous image is this...
..the crucifixion of Jesus.
People who come here now have all kinds of different reactions
to this painting. Some are overwhelmed by the size.
Some are puzzled by the busy bits of detail.
Critics and art historians have had different reactions, too.
Some of them have honed in on the technique, picking out
Tintoretto's bold brushstrokes
or the contrast between light and shade.
Some have concentrated instead on the emotion of the scene.
And that's the line that John Ruskin took in the 19th century
when he was so dumbfounded by it, that he said the painting
was absolutely impossible to analyse.
Think he might have tried a bit harder.
What Tintoretto has done
is blur the lines between the viewer and the painting.
Some of the characters there are wearing modern,
that is 16th century, dress, not biblical outfits.
And there are some ordinary 16th century people
doing the digging, tugging on the ropes and putting up the ladders.
More than that, if we stand in front of it, it's almost as if you
become part of the encircling crowd around that central scene.
What's being hammered home here is the fact that the crucifixion
is both a historical event in past time
and a religious event,
which breaks down the barriers of time and space.
But there is another, more controversial reading
of this painting which often gets lost
on the connoisseurs who stand before it.
This painting was produced at a really critical
moment in the story of the brotherhood
when they were being attacked for spending far too much on bling
and on doing up their premises, and not half enough on helping the poor.
In some of his pictures,
Tintoretto seems to be responding to that charge.
When he included beggars in the scene of the Last Supper,
or the kind of ordinary people the brotherhood was supposed to
support in the scene of the crucifixion that really
looks like a calculated defence of their charitable aims
in the face of opposition.
But the whole controversy points to a crucial problem in religious art.
The more you plough your resources
into the visual glorification of God...
..the more you lay yourself open to the accusation
that you're more interested in the material than in the spiritual.
That you're more interested in worldly vanities than in piety.
We're now treading the fault lines between art and religion
and the problems of picturing the divine.
And here the perils of vanity are just the beginning.
Seville has been a centre of Catholic image making for centuries,
home to some of Spain's greatest religious painters...
..Velazquez, Zurbaran and Murillo.
And images still play a big part in the religious life of the city.
WOMAN RECITES PRAYER IN SPANISH
But, here in Seville, there's one image that has a peculiar power.
WOMAN CONTINUES PRAYING
Housed in the church of the Macarena is a statue of the Virgin Mary.
She's been here for over 300 years,
crying in sorrow at the death of her son, Jesus.
She's tremendously impressive.
She was started in the 17th century
and one story is she's the work originally of a female sculptor
because only a woman could quite capture the Virgin like this.
But she's been added to ever since -
when she got that splendid gold crown,
when she started wearing those very big capes,
and she's got a large wardrobe,
and she often changes her dress.
The every day care and attention paid to this statue
might at first seem a little odd.
But she was intended to have an aura of humanity about her.
Her tears may be made of glass but her hair is real human hair.
Her exposed flesh, that's her head and hands, are made of wood because
they thought wood was much warmer than marble, was more organic.
And, in other ways, she's treated as if she's a human being,
so, no-one apart from the nuns are allowed to take her clothes off.
In many ways, she's not finished but a work in progress which only
becomes complete for a single night at the most sacred time of year...
..at Easter.
The holy cross is presented to the crowd
and hooded penitents begin to march.
For many, this is highly charged and emotional.
Now they wait, longing for the extraordinary moment when the Virgin
appears at the threshold,
and a moment of transformation is at hand.
HE KNOCKS
Carried on a throne, she begins her journey into the night.
And, as she moves, the statue seems to come to life.
It's as if the likeness of the Virgin has become her presence.
And you can see that in the astonishing
reaction of the faithful.
CHEERING BECOMES LOUDER
But this adoration breeds suspicion
because here in Seville there are some in the church who fear
that the image of the Virgin
has stolen the limelight from the Virgin herself.
The big question is what are the worshippers worshipping?
Is it the idea of the Virgin Mary who somehow is out there,
beyond the image?
Or are they worshipping the statue itself?
That's to say this is the idolatry question,
which almost all religions have faced.
The hierarchy of the church has always been anxious
about reactions to such statues and the expense lavished on them.
It has seemed uncomfortably close to the worship of images
prohibited by the Ten Commandments.
The Catholic Church has to be very careful about those people
who are... whose faith is not very deep.
Because the problem is that people in front of the statue
think that that's all.
The danger is that they believe that everything is that, the statue.
And we have to be careful.
That's not the way.
It has been blessed, and things like that, but it's a statue.
That's a representation of something higher.
You have to believe that through that statue
you go up to the divinity.
It's a basic and perennial problem of religious art,
which all religions must face.
But they take different views of how to handle it.
And of religious imagery more generally.
Out on the rural fringes of Istanbul is one of the most striking
religious creations of modern times.
It appeared on the landscape less than a decade ago
and has drawn people in ever since.
It's the Sancaklar Mosque...
..the work of one of Turkey's most visionary architects.
This is one of the most startling mosques in the world.
What the architects wanted to do is to harness
the power of modernism, which is
often thought of as a very secular movement, to express the very
essence of religious space, stripped of all the non-essentials.
And it's certainly untraditional in all kinds of ways.
But, in other ways,
it's exploiting the traditions of Islam very heavily.
This inside space is meant to be reminiscent of the Cave of Hira,
where the Prophet Muhammad first received
the revelation of the Word of God that became the Koran.
And, of course,
it also evokes one of the classic stereotypes that many people now
have of Islam, that it's a religion that is in some way artless.
That it prohibits not just the image of God and the Prophet,
but the images of living creatures which only the creator, God,
is supposed to be able to create.
In fact, the only man-made image is a wonderful
piece of calligraphy which is a quote from the Koran.
It's as if what we're expected to do when we come in here
is to see and go away with the Word of God.
Islam, as a faith of the word, is enshrined in the Koran itself.
There are many famous sayings and stories that condemn idolatry
and give warning about the dangers of images.
But in the ancient city of Istanbul itself,
a very different picture of Islam fills our field of vision.
Islam is absolutely not an artless religion.
In the whole history of the faith,
you cannot trace a single, uncontested line
about images of living creatures or about the image of God.
In the Middle Ages, the Islamic world held some of the most
intricate debates on aesthetics, the nature of beauty,
the optics of the human eye,
and our sensory experience of the natural world.
And there's a kaleidoscope of stories
and parables that are Islam's conversation with itself
about the role of the artist and the purpose of the image.
And one of the most revealing takes us
into the domestic life of the Prophet Muhammad himself.
One day, Muhammad came home to discover that his wife Aisha
had acquired a tapestry
with images of living creatures woven into the design.
And she'd hung it up.
Muhammad is furious, he won't even go into the house
because it's the creator God who's supposed to create living
creatures, not some tapestry artist.
So, Aisha takes it down but she doesn't let it go to waste.
She cuts it up and turns it into cushion covers,
and that, apparently, creates no problem.
The story of Aisha's cushion is a wonderful illustration of how
Islamic attitudes can shift according to the role
and the setting of the image.
But there's one kind of Islamic art whose role
and function is much more significant than any other.
As soon as Muhammad received the Word of God
in the 7th century,
calligraphy, or the art of beautiful writing, was taken
to the very heart of Islamic identity.
There's an obligation on the calligrapher to serve
the community in which he or she is writing for.
But calligraphers were highly esteemed.
The pen is the potent symbol of knowledge.
The art of calligraphy became the means by which the sacred word
could be set down, spread, and remain uncorrupted for all time.
From the very birth of Islam,
the first verses revealed to the Prophet Muhammad were by the pen.
Therefore, it sanctified the use of the pen at the outset of Islam.
And, ever since that point, artisans have been trying to beautify
the divine word through that pen.
Of course, the text of the calligraphy
is very impressive
but, for me, what is more important is the visual
of the calligraphy, the graphic,
the balance and the rhythm of the calligraphy.
To be a good calligrapher, you have to have years of work in you.
Even on one single letter.
It takes a complete life
to come to that maturity to do a good calligraphy.
So, you see all his life in a single stroke.
With exquisite penmanship,
Islam had an art form to set it apart from many other religions.
And it was said that while the Koran was received in Mecca
and spoken in Cairo,
it was Istanbul that produced the finest calligraphers
able to write it down.
This is the Blue Mosque.
It was commissioned in the 17th century by Sultan Ahmed...
..and, in its almost excessive size and splendour,
it was designed to surpass all other mosques in the city.
There are no idols or images of living creatures.
Instead, the walls are alive with the most ornate patterns.
Plants and flowers intertwine in the most vivid glaze of ceramic tiles.
And, laced into the scheme,
are some of the most extraordinary
examples of monumental calligraphy in the Islamic world.
It's as if the Blue Mosque itself was conceived
as a great library of Islamic script,
and it's here that we see calligraphy at its most powerful.
When you enter the building, above the door, there's a message
telling you to expect something special,
that you're going through the Gates of Paradise.
And that's just one of a whole series of notices throughout
the Mosque, often beautifully written snippets of the Koran
which guide the thoughts of the faithful and interpret what you see.
If you look up into the dome, you're reminded that it's Allah
who supports the heavens and the world.
And it was a message that basically says that you should take back
there into the outside world the state of purity that
you've reached through prayer.
It's as if there's a written programme here,
telling you how to experience the building and how to look at it.
But for those who worshipped and still worship here,
there's another way of reading this writing.
Placed high above the prayer hall, the script becomes almost illegible.
When it was first painted,
many of the faithful would have been illiterate.
And, even for those who could read, the clarity of the message is
obscured in the rhythm and patterns of the text.
This very magnificent, elaborate script is quite complex.
It's not always easy to read and I don't think it was meant to be read.
Sometimes it's there also as a form of blessing.
And, just by looking at it, you can absorb some of that blessing.
What we have to remember is that writing can work in other ways.
Here, we are seeing God represented
in visual form but not as human.
Here, God is displayed as his word in the Koran.
It's God in the art of writing.
Now, Islam is by no means the only religion to use writing
as a way to negotiate the problem of how you represent the divine.
The Christian gospels, for example, can claim that God is the word.
But in Islam, more than anywhere else,
we see the image becoming the word, and the word becoming the image.
In the face of all the debates and prohibitions on images, Islamic
calligraphy evolved to redefine what an image of God could be.
No single religion has ever managed completely to resolve
the tension between word and image, but there are some moments
when it might just seem possible.
These wonderfully appealing images were made over 500 years ago
and they're from the pages of a Jewish Bible.
What's so remarkable is that they dance around a text that is
dense with warnings about idols and images.
And, yet, they flout them in the most charming and beautiful way.
I've got this extraordinary book open on the page
of the second commandment, the one that prohibits idols.
Now, there have been centuries of debate
and disagreement about what that prohibition actually meant.
But, in this case,
unless there's an appallingly flagrant contradiction going on,
it is not taken to forbid a quite extravagant
set of images,
even on the same opening as the second commandment,
you get these two little chaps, little big bums there.
And, throughout the book, you find really lavish pictures.
Here is a full page of the menorah.
And the rather lovely narrative scenes,
like Jonah and his encounter with the whale.
But what makes the Bible so precious
is that it's a testament to a brief
but extraordinary moment in Spanish history when Muslim, Christian,
and Jewish traditions came together
in a really productive and imaginative way.
If you look at this book, you can see in some ways the Jewish artist
really celebrating the mixed traditions of medieval Spain.
Some of it really clearly
has roots in Islamic traditions.
And this is a wonderful image, rather like a carpet,
and, at first sight, it looks very, very Islamic.
Then you discover, when you look carefully,
that it's got this incy-wincy writing all around it,
micrography, it's called, which is really distinctively Jewish.
So, it's a wonderful bit of cultural blending in itself.
And there are bits of Christian tradition, a wonderful picture
of King David actually based on a European playing card.
Now, the man who did these extraordinary images
very proudly signs his name
over a whole page at the very end of the book.
He says that
"I Joseph ibn Hayyim decorated and finished this."
Now, these Jewish bibles are not very often signed,
certainly not signed in a way that takes a whole page.
This is wonderful chutzpah, it's a kind of artist who
even at the very end of his work can't keep that artistry in.
But this is much more than a name.
Here Joseph ibn Hayyim is addressing the fundamental issue
of word and image that divides so many religions.
And, in his own way, he settles the debate.
In his hands, they're one and the same thing.
The poignant fact is that under 20 years after this page was completed,
the Catholics expelled the Jews from Spain.
This Bible survives not only as a witness to integration,
but also to religious war.
So too in England.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants and Catholics
fought over this land in a conflict whose visual scars
can be found in churches across the country.
There's no more powerful evidence of that than Ely Cathedral.
Though later much restored,
Ely remains an exquisite jewel of Gothic architecture.
Its cavernous knave,
its ornate carvings that still reflect their medieval colours.
And high above, this extraordinary Octagonal Lantern,
almost a gateway to heaven itself.
But during the great religious schism,
the splendour of Ely would fall victim to one of England's
most infamous Protestant reformers.
On 9 January 1644, Oliver Cromwell,
who was then Governor of Ely, marched into this cathedral
in what is one of the most mythologised and probably
highly embellished incidents in the English Religious Civil Wars.
It's hard to imagine it now because it all feels so tranquil here,
but the story goes that
Cromwell went up to the priest who was conducting evening service,
told him to put away his version of the prayer book,
to stop the choir singing - a kind of "turn off the music" moment -
and then he either actively encouraged
or at least did nothing to stop his troops turning on the fabric,
and the images and the glass in the place.
As they went through the vestry and the cloisters,
what they did was basically smash the place up.
Cromwell's attack was just one assault in a long campaign
against the images at Ely.
For these reformers, the worship of holy images
was a Catholic superstition,
a distraction from the pure word of God.
The images at Ely had to go.
And here in the Lady Chapel,
there remains evidence of widespread destruction on another occasion.
Lots of different kinds of iconoclasm have gone on here.
The original stained-glass windows are one obvious casualty.
But they've also gone for the figures - of saints, of kings
and the scenes from the life of the Virgin.
Sometimes the whole sculpture's just been removed,
but quite often what they've done is they've just taken away
the head and the hands, leaving the body in place.
It's as if they were aiming to destroy those bits of the sculpture
that gave it its most living power, the bits that you interacted with.
The point is, I think, that this isn't just random vandalism,
this is quite focused, even thoughtful destruction.
Iconoclasm is something we often deplore,
but there is another way of looking at it.
Those figures minus heads and minus hands have not been made invisible.
It's almost as if they've
been turned into a different sort of image in their own right.
An artful narrative of religious conflict.
But there are more and perhaps unintended consequences
to such artful destruction.
Liberated, you might almost say,
from the figures of saints and prophets that once crowded the walls
and with its clear stainless windows, the Lady Chapel
has been transformed, giving us another version of beauty.
This is a tremendously aesthetically pleasing space.
It's light and airy and a marvellous mixture of austerity and decoration.
And we owe that to the iconoclasts.
This fine balance between destruction and creation
is often overlooked,
but it's what makes iconoclasm so interesting, so paradoxical.
And it gets yet more intriguing
when we look at other theatres of religious war.
When Muslim armies from Afghanistan invaded India in the 12th century,
they were horrified by what they found.
This was the original home of the Hindu faith,
were people worshipped not one God but millions.
Worse still, artists across India were kept busy
creating a never-ending array of idols
that were central to Hindu religion.
Muslim writers often presented India
as a place of image worship gone mad,
even as the very origin of idols themselves.
One story had it that idols only spread more widely in the world
because they'd been washed away from India
by the waters of Noah's flood.
Along with these stories,
legendary tales were sent back to the Muslim world
of mass idol-breaking and the total destruction of Hindu temples.
And in their place, the Muslim crusaders built this.
This is the first mosque in Delhi.
Constructed in the 1190s,
it was once known as the most imposing mosque in the world.
Huge arches form a grand gateway,
a towering minaret proclaims Islam as the one true faith.
And in the centre, surrounding the prayer hall,
is this extraordinary ornate colonnade.
It's easy to imagine this
as a sanctuary for the Muslims who made it,
an island of Islam in an idolatrous Hindu world.
But in this building,
the Hindu world isn't quite so distant as it may seem.
Various elements of earlier Hindu structures and images
have actually been reused and incorporated into its very fabric.
One point must be to assert conquest by Islam
and to show how the Hindu idols have at least been neutralised.
But even when they have been defaced, some aspects
of the humanity of these human figures have been preserved.
The simple fact, for example,
that they've chosen to place most of them the right way up,
suggests a respect for the human form and its image.
This remarkable mosque portrays a certain appreciation
of the very pictures Islam condemned.
And just like Ely Cathedral,
it demonstrates that even in the most severe cases of iconoclasm,
art lives on - inextricably bound to faith.
But destruction can raise even bigger questions too.
I want to end at one of the world's most famous and densest
religious spaces, a place once the home of the ancient gods,
later converted into a Christian church
and later still turned into a mosque.
Built around 450BC, the Parthenon was originally dedicated to the
goddess Athena, and for centuries it teamed with images of the divine.
It used to be one of the richest and most colourful,
most intense religious places anywhere.
A real phantasmagoria of religious images.
And everywhere you looked, there were religious offerings,
altars for sacrifice and temples.
Only the bare bones of Ancient Greek or any other religion stand here
today, but it's become the focus of a worship of another kind.
It's easy to come to a place like the Acropolis and to assume
that whatever religion there once was here has gone for good.
But I think we should be a bit more careful.
However secular they might be,
when people here look at this monument,
when they admire its art and engage with its mythology,
many are reflecting on questions
that religions have often helped us face.
Where do I come from? Where do I belong?
What's my place in human history?
I think people are engaged in a modern faith here,
the one we call civilisation.
It's an idea that behaves very much like a religion.
It offers grand narratives about our origins and our destiny.
Bringing people together in shared belief.
And the Parthenon has become its icon.
So if you ask me, "What is civilisation?"
I say, "It's little more than an act of faith."
The Open University has produced a free poster that explores
the history of different civilisations through artefacts.
To order your free copy, please call...
..or go to the address on-screen
and follow the links for the Open University.