There are many reasons people find themselves attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy, but one of them is the presence and veneration of icons. Entering a sanctuary full of religious art can seem visually stunning and feel refreshingly spiritual compared to kitschy banners or television screens or hospital-blank walls. For the westerner, icons suggest a certain “eastern” and ancient feel to worship. This can seem far more authentic.
The Orthodox since the 9th century have also been very ready to claim the rhetorical high ground of being faithful to the doctrine of the incarnation and embracing the materiality of salvation. God became a man. He literally, physically embraced the created world, matter, and was conceived in the womb of Mary. Therefore aesthetics matter, beauty matters, the material world matters, and even more significantly, because of the incarnation, matter is capable of mediating the presence of God to our senses, thereby granting people a share in the Divine life through prayer and contemplation.
All too often, the unsuspecting and untrained Protestant, sucking the fumes of modernity and postmodernity, finds himself starving for a more fully human experience of God and takes the bait and swims the Bosporus.
There is much here we might discuss, and many books have been written for and against the making and venerating of icons, including one I’ve just been scouring, the Roman Catholic Alain Besancon’s The Forbidden Image (about which more below). But let me just begin with a simple plea and then sketch one argument against the making and venerating of icons of Christ.
First the plea: do some serious study of the actual issues and arguments from both sides. This will take some time to do well. But if you are currently a Protestant considering taking the plunge, do yourself, your family, your current church family, and the catholic tradition the honor of really studying this topic. Can you summarize John of Damascus’ defense of icons? Can you explain where his defense is flawed (according to the Orthodox)? Can you summarize the iconoclastic argument of Constantine V? And what was flawed about his argument? Now sketch the contributions of Nicephorus the Patriarch of Constantinople and Theodore the Studite (abbot of the monastery at Studium). What did the Second Council of Nicaea actually decide? Be specific and trace the conclusion from Nicaea, Chalcedon, through John of Damascus, Nicephorus and Theodore. Now, are you familiar with the Western Carolingian response to the Second Council of Nicaea? Evaluate the claims in light of what you’ve already considered. Do your Protestant heritage the honor of reading the original Reformers on images. Summarize the views of Luther, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Bucer, and Calvin on the making and veneration of images. Finally, do some reading on the history of iconography itself. How widespread were the use of icons in the first three centuries? Does that matter? When the icon “triumphed” after Second Nicaea what stylistic changes did the icon undergo between then and the modern day? What does that mean?
So much for my plea. And related to all of this, spend time as you read and study comparing your notes with trusted counselors and friends, not just people who will smile and nod, but the kind of people who challenge you to think critically and carefully.
Now for the sketch of an argument.
In a recent blog post, Father Stephen Freeman extols the virtues of icons emphasizing the popular notion (going back to John of Damascus) that icons affirm the goodness of creation, but more specifically, that they (and all creation) participate in God’s divine life because of the incarnation. Therefore, Freeman claims, the veneration of icons is an invitation to communion with God, and by extension, an invitation to communion with God through the rest of creation. All of creation is “icon and sacrament” Freeman informs us.
Now it may be that Freeman is only waxing poetic and somewhat ecstatic, and doesn’t intend to explain the actual Orthodox dogma on icons. But the fact remains that at least part of what Freeman is extolling is explicitly not accepted by the Second Council of Nicaea. Now, it is most certainly true that the “heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1) and what may be known about God “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:19-20). But the Orthodox Church hardly has a corner on the market of this kind of glory. This kind of creational glory is speaking every day in every language. But we should note that this creational revelation that speaks about God and invites us to know Him through His created order didn’t suddenly happen at the incarnation. It has been “clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world.” But that reality always stood happily right alongside the prohibition against bowing down to anything in heaven or on the earth or under the earth (Ex. 20:4-5). The heavens proclaim the glory of God day after day, and yet God’s people were not to bow down to them.
Alain Besancon notes that while John of Damascus continues to be one of Orthodoxy’s heroes, his actual articulation (some of which Freeman quotes) is actually more Neoplatonic than Biblical or Christian. The idea that creation and therefore icons “participate” in the being of God and become places of communion with God because of the incarnation is not what the Second Council of Nicaea actually affirmed. It was the militant Emperor Constantine V who seized on John’s language and objected that this left every door open in the house for idolatry and pantheism. Where does the divine nature begin and end? While John likely meant it in a very Greek (Neoplatonic) way, where parts of the universe participate by degrees as they find themselves further down the totem pole of being (ha), this is still not the biblical doctrine of the goodness of creation. Creation isn’t good or sacred because it participates in the Divine being. It’s good and sacred because God made it good and sacred. It’s good and sacred because in its own existence, it reflects and speaks truly about the goodness and glory and holiness of God. Constantine seized on the language of “nature” and “substance” as used at the first council of Nicaea and pointed out that if John was right, that icons participate in that Divine ousia (or “being”), the only way an icon might be properly made and venerated was if it fully participated in the divine substance and was therefore consubstantial or “homooussios” with God. In which case, as Besancon notes, no icons for anybody.
Constantine V tried to pin a couple of different Christological heresies on the iconodules which Besancon notes kept them busy for nearly a generation, but when Nicephorus and Theodore came on the scene, the tables turned and a bit more clarity emerged. Constantine said that if icons “circumscribe” the divine being then the iconodules have fallen into Monophysitism (attributing to Christ only one substance/nature) but if the iconodules claim they only portray Christ’s humanity, then they are slipping into Nestorianism (attempting to separate the divine and human natures). Nicephorus to some extent and Theodore to a greater extent replied by insisting that Constantine was the one actually verging on Christological heresy. A picture or icon, they replied, does not seek to circumscribe “natures,” but rather the “hypostasis” – a specific person. And in the case of Christ, Chalcedon made it clear that it was the one person, the Lord Jesus Christ in whom the divine and human natures were joined without confusion, without separation, etc. Besancon notes that Theodore drove this point home by insisting that an icon of Christ should not actually be called an “icon of Christ” but simply “Christ” since it is (or ought to be) the very hypostasis of Christ. In other words, the substance/being of the icon remains wood and paint and gold, but the “name” or “inscription” is Christ and therefore because of that correspondence, Christ rightly receives the honor bestowed to His icon. It is this view that the Second Council of Nicaea affirmed: “whoever bows down in adoration before the icon, is at the same time bowing down in adoration to the substance (or hypostasis) of the one therein painted.”
The point that Theodore labored to make is that it is the likeness or resemblance between the picture and the person represented that validates the veneration. The icon is not participating in the Divine being. Nor is the icon attempting to say something merely symbolic. To drift into symbolism would be to fall under Constantine’s critique of circumscribing or dividing natures. To say that an icon participates in the being of God in some way opens the door to all the criticisms of the iconoclasts regarding idolatry and down the path to pantheism. Theodore and Nicaea II sidestepped these critiques by claiming that an icon is not an abstraction, nor a symbol but rather is saying something specific and concrete, something true, and that is: this is Christ. Thus, to be in accordance with Nicaea II and Theodore, the Orthodox position really must insist that the icons of Christ are in fact true representations of the man Jesus Christ and that whenever they have seen His icon, they have truly seen Christ.
And here we arrive at long last at the problem. First, let us grant that if there had been photographers on site in Judea during the earthly days of Jesus it would have been fine to take pictures of Jesus, preserve those pictures, and venerate those pictures. For the sake of argument, let’s grant that the Seventh Ecumenical Council’s argument is sound in principle. The question comes down to whether we have strong enough evidence to believe that the icons we now have are in fact accurate portraits of Christ. And very much related to that, did Jesus and the apostles intend for a central part of the ministry of the Church to be through the making and venerating of images? The actual historical evidence seems decidedly against this. As David Vandrunen notes in his article Iconoclasm, Incarnation and Eschatology, “The New Testament consistently, across genres and authors, speaks about the present invisibility of Christ in view of the eternal…. In speaking about the present age as one of being at home in the body and away from the Lord, with the hope of the resurrection looming, Paul states that ‘we walk by faith, not by sight’ [2 Cor. 5:7]… Similar remarks pertain to 1 Peter 1…. ‘Though not seeing him, you love him, and though not seeing him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy’ (1:8).” Likewise, Jesus Himself speaks of His ascension as a time when His followers will not see Him. And it would take several centuries after the Ascension before many icons would appear on the Christian scene, and only then contested, and many looking far different from what is now received as the authorized icon of Jesus.
In other words, there are hefty biblical and historical arguments against assuming that modern icons of Christ actually resemble the Jewish man they claim to. And if they do not, they are not in fact the hypostasis of Christ, and therefore we are left with millions of Christians praying in front of pictures of someone else. Either that someone else is real and exists (but we don’t know them) or else the canonized face of Jesus is the result of the composite imagination of artists. In either case, as Vandrunen notes, it’d be a bit odd for you to be on a long business trip carrying around the picture of another woman who is not your wife while insisting that she’s fine with it because you imagine that it’s her. And if you retreat to the position that it’s just a holy symbol, and it merely reminds you of Christ then you’ve rejected (or redefined) Nicaea II, and contrary to Freeman’s claim, icon veneration is not an invitation to contemplate the real material world but an abstraction, an idea.
While much remains to be discussed about whether and how Christian art and symbolism may or may not have lesser roles to play in the education or devotion of the faithful, the facile dismissals of voices within the catholic faith objecting to the making and veneration of images is not sufficient to answer the substantive historical and theological objections to the practice. If seeing Jesus was to be a central part of our worship, why was this not instituted from the beginning? And in its place why do Jesus and His apostles assume the exact opposite – that Jesus for the present is invisible, that we cannot see Him, and that we long to see Him face to face (e.g. 1 Cor. 13:12)? For Protestant Christians who oppose the veneration of icons, the alternative is not Gnosticism or anti-incarnational asceticism – though Besancon points out that ironically many of the first icons grew out of precisely that tendency to leave the world and physical bodies behind. Rather, a robust, incarnational Protestantism confesses with the church catholic that Christ has come in the flesh and Christ will come again in the flesh to renew all things. In the meantime, the original good creation groans, eagerly awaiting that redemption and the redemption of the bodies of the sons of God.
There is a way of knowing God in and through creation, and certainly God has manifested His determination to heal this broken world through the incarnation, death and resurrection of the God-man Jesus. And truly, creation was and is meant as a place of communion with the Triune God. But the best of the catholic tradition has not directed our gaze to contemplate theologically and historically ambiguous portraits. Rather, the best of the tradition points to the Word preached, water poured, bread broken, wine shared with thanksgiving and joy, and from there sends us out into the real world to dig, to plant, to paint, to build, to hike, to study, to invent, to eat, to drink, to play. The best of the Christian tradition longs to see Jesus face to face, longs to see creation healed, and in the meantime meets the risen Savior by His Spirit in the living, breathing icon of the Christian Church, His Body, the center of new creation life.
David says
A prominent SBC seminary president has icons in his study. A prominent theologian with Campus Crusade, who is writing a book against Orthodoxy, also has icons in his study. (But, of course, neither of them genuflect before or kiss those icons.) And there is the preacher I heard once at Shepherd’s Conference (I forget his name) who said he preaches every week as if Calvin were in the audience.
Southern Baptists put American flags on their rostrum, crosses on their baptistry walls, and Salman’s Jesus in the Sunday school room.
Protestants blithely sing to the angels at Christmas, and venerate Mary without thinking through the words of select Christmas carols.
The average Christian would, I think, have a terrific twinge of conscience if they disposed of an old Bible in the trash.
So Protestants are not exactly exempt from an iconography and veneration of their own making and flavor. We as spiritual beings tend toward a bridge between the “here and now” and the “there and now”. The entire Old Testament scripture is, itself, a venerable icon of Christ. The actual, physical constructs in the Old Testament are venerable icons: the Ark of the Covenant being one of most sacred among them. In the New Testament, Acts 19:12 simply cannot be explained by today’s Protestant theologian – we just don’t understand. (Yes, yes, there are sound explanations, but my point is no one satisfactorily explains the “why” of those marvelous experiences in the early church. I argue that early church was in greater awe than a typical OPC congregant, and infinitely more spirit-filled than an Assembly of God Christian.)
Protestantism might be more intellectually and/or emotionally “enriching”, but I would assert that Protestantism is not as spiritually enriching as Orthodoxy. I observe that Protestant Christians live lives of hypocrisy and doctrinal confusion to a far greater degree than their Orthodox brethren. If Protestant heritage is so great, then the state of Protestantism should be better than it is. To gasp in disbelief that Protestantism (and its cousin, Anabaptism) is not dysfunctional and broken is to ignore the never-ending, deep messes within its ranks. (Phil Johnson, Dr. John MacArthur’s right-hand, spent years blogging about those very things within Protestantism. And with icons of Spurgeon, I might add.)
I am not Orthodox. But I have legitimately studied Orthodoxy since 1981 and know Orthodox Christians well. Your article, while exacting, clear and logical, is obviously written with a bias, and without the internalized understanding of an Orthodox Christian. No Orthodox Christian or Priest I have ever known actually believes the extrapolated logic you present any more than you, probably, do not believe the various extrapolations and foibles of so-called Calvinism. Neither is your argument helped by suggesting that honor should be paid to protestant heritage. I do not believe that the gospel was “delivered once for all” just 500 years ago, anymore than James White believes that the King James Version is the only translation of value. Was there no vein of Truth in the church between, say, Nicea and Zurich? Mid-Acts dispensationalists would say no.
All these variants within Protestantism! They all believe – BELIEVE – very different things, and yet all claim that the Protestant Reformation is a revival of that gospel once-for-all delivered to the saints. Yes, among the divergence of Protestantism I can usually find one Lord (unless it’s Trinitarian James MacDonald defending TD Jakes’ poor theology) but I have a harder time finding one faith, let alone one baptism.
So I am not impressed with what protestant evangelicalism has fruited for us today at all, with its American individualism, charismatic weirdos, production-oriented megachurches, lack of liturgical guidance, and casual hymnody (which, arguably, is less and less Trinitarian as the years go by.) It is more than difficult to find protestant Christians who actually believe something of substance, compared to the ease with which I have found young and old Orthodox Christians who can tell me exactly what they believe, and what their church’s imagery represents. History could argue that the Orthodox have produced overcoming-martyrs for centuries, while American protestants whine for their constitutional rights, call dressing-up for church “legalism”, can’t decide whether Mormons are a cult, don’t know how Old Testament saints were saved, and can’t tolerate a 45-minute expository sermon that encroaches on their child’s Sunday soccer game (compared to Orthodoxy’s 2-hour standing-no-sitting liturgy week after week.)
I would argue that Reformed theologians certainly venerate Calvin every bit as much as the Orthodox venerate St. John Chrysostom. But Calvinist-adherents in-the-pew are rarely able to tell us much about Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, etc., and why they are important to the roots of the Church that survived until Luther. Then you have certain Anabaptists who venerate white walls, hard benches, uniforms, and their historical anti-creed “meeting minutes”, while deploring all imagery and art in worship altogether: which ends up being a kind of veneration in itself.
I find Orthodoxy ever-struggling to be reverent, confessional, alive, historically linked to the early church, and eschatologically linked to living saints. I find that it preaches salvation, by grace through faith. I find that it teaches Hebrews 11. I find that it teaches James’ “faith with works”. (Yes, “that James”: the one that Protestant Luther tried to de-canonize.) Orthodox venerate believing saints, and their icons focus the soul toward the Kingdom of God.
I find Protestantism to be an ever-ready producer of splintered doctrines, aberrant practices, shallow-thinking people-in-the-pew, irreverent, unable to confess to each other, myopically focused on today only, enamored with politics & moralism, and waxing against everything except their own lack of true belief and lack of Spirit-filled lives. Protestants end up venerating their own sectarian heroes (Calvin, Zwingli, Darby, Ellen G. White…), and their iconoclasm permits much worldly distraction of the soul.
Toby says
David, thanks for the comment. There’s a LOT here. And I’m not sure I can do justice to the complexity of your situation. Suffice it to say that there is much that you say which is lamentably true about the state of modern Protestantism, though I’m afraid you’ve allowed that to color everything. Not sure you see the enormous blessings passed down to the modern world from the Protestant movement. And on the flip side, as you note, there are truly praiseworthy elements in Orthodoxy, and yet there are horrific blemishes on that body too. Not sure you’ve accounted for that. But blessings on you as you study and pray.
Joel says
Good points all. This might be of interest: http://alivingtext.com/blog/2014/07/19/icons-and-paganism/
I have an essay on this in draft form, and need to finish it up.
Garry says
What spirit do you think provokes someone to destroy places of prayer and vigorous devotion to the Trinity (monasteries), God or Satan? Let’s not be “gnostic” in divorcing iconoclast doctrine from its consistently violent works.
You wrote “Jesus Himself speaks of His ascension as a time when His followers will not see Him” to defend your idea that an Icon of Christ is contrary to this statement:
If a woman’s husband goes off to war and she has his picture, does that mean he is no longer away from her? Physical bodily presence is the context that Peter was talking about. The Icon does not mean Christ is physically present in an ethnically accurate painting, it means Christ assumed human flesh and came physically, so his human nature can be depicted. When the woman kisses the picture of the husband away at war, she does so not believing the image itself is her husband, but that her affections are directed toward her absent husband through the medium of the image.
If your child drew a picture of you, do you then say, “That’s not me,” and tear the image apart? Do you not condescend to their level and congratulate them on their efforts to love you? Does the artistic inability indicate that the child is looking at someone else who isn’t the father, when they literally use the father as the object of depiction? The fact that the child even attempts to draw their father testifies to the father’s human nature. Not because it is an accurate depiction, but because there is a body. If the child were to say, “I cannot even begin to draw you,” it would mean you do not have a material form to depict.
You may rationalize your way out of Icons, or deny the 7th Ecumenical Council, but you’re definitely not going to Zwingli your way out of a real Eucharist and still be faithful to historical Christianity.
Toby says
Garry, thanks for the comment. I’m not here arguing in defense of the violent excesses of iconoclasts. But the iconodules were sometimes just as violent in their defense of icon veneration. On the picture of the wife analogy, my point was NOT that such a thing isn’t conceivable with Christ. The point was a question about whether we actually have such an accurate historical depiction of Jesus. The 7th Ecumenical Council says that it’s right to venerate icons of Christ because they depict Him accurately. I’m asking if that in fact is the case. And last, a child’s drawing should of course be received gratefully, but that’s not the same thing as legitimizing bowing down to it, kissing it, and etc. Cheers.
Sarah Gingrich says
I appreciate the depth of your research on icons, but I would affirm David’s response. Further, I think the hunger for many of us is not so much for “a more fully human experience of God”, but for apostolic authority, truth that has stood the test of time and inspired martyrs and saints to give all for their beloved Christ, for rootedness within the history of the Church, all the way back to the frightened disciples huddling in fear, rather than depending on theological innovations only 500 years old, many of which would be rejected as heresy by the early church.
Just as you ask would-be Orthodox to carefully consider the history and arguments for/against icons, I would, in return, ask Protestants to ask actual Orthodox people what they are doing when they venerate an icon or a relic for that matter; ask a priest, ask a pious old grandmother. You would find indeed, not people bowing to paint and wood and bone and art, but people bowing to the presence of God which was made manifest in the lives of those depicted, giving Him the honor for how the saint lived and gave glory to God. When we kiss the priest’s hand, we are not giving worship to our dear priest, but to Christ who works through him. Are you familiar with the Orthodox understanding of God’s essence vs. His energies? It might be helpful in navigating some of the more common misunderstandings here (sometimes we are arguing thinking words and definitions are static and commonly held, which is, more often than not, not the case).
I am not a theologian, which is probably quite obvious, but am a Protestant on the road to Orthodoxy. I am surrounded by wonderful Reformed friends who are, by far, better Christians than I am. I love them and their devotion to the Word. They lovingly teach me, challenge me, and warn me. What can I say to them, well-educated and articulate in their defenses as they are…everything that I read of the fathers, of the saints, of Orthodox theologians, it resonates with life and clarity and it brings knowledge into my heart, love of God into my heart, no longer trapped within a cerebral faith. I do not know why this is so, but I find that the deeper I delve into the Church, the more I find, the deeper my joy, the more childlike my faith, and for the first time, intimacy with Christ. I am taking a medicine that is curing me, but I do not know how or why, what the active ingredients are and why they effect change within me.
This has been my peace when other things within the Church still feel foreign and alien to me. I can truly trust that the Church that Christ founded didn’t die, the lights didn’t go out until the 1500’s; I can trust God to preserve the apostolic lines of authority.
As to icons (and to any other material thing that is given reverence), the turning point for me was reading 2 Kings 13:21. Holiness resided in Elisha’s bones; it brought a man back to life quite suddenly! In your research did you give any weight to the evidence of peoples’ miraculous healings and conversions from icons, or from the myrrh that streams from some of them?
A friend rightly asked recently why the Holy Spirit depicted Himself as a dove at Christ’s baptism. It was not, of course, that we would understand Him as birdlike, but that God had visited us in a form our eyes could understand. This limits nothing of His glory, it is a gift to our limited minds.
Anyways, thank you for addressing the topic; I do wish icons were understood better rather than being written-off as idols.
Toby says
Sarah, thanks for the comment. My only encouragement would be that you give some further study to what the first Protestant Reformers believed concerning the “apostolic authority” of Protestantism. They most certainly did not believe they were starting a *new* Church, rather, as the foremost patristic scholars of their day, re-discovered and recovered the true catholic and apostolic faith once delivered to the saints. Blessings.
Jon says
No to either/or theology. You misunderstand the place of visual art in the whole context of Christian life and worship, and therefore your argument falls into a straw man. Try again.
Bloffsnoffler says
A list of further reading – specific titles and authors –
would be greatly appreciated!! As a theological dabbler I wouldn’t know how to track down half of these resources.
Lisa says
I say AMEN to brother David for his accurate response.
Perry C Robinson says
Icons can seem more “eastern” (whatever that means) if one hasn’t been to Europe and seen pre-medieval Christian art or taken a history of art course covering the first millennium of Christianity, pretty much everywhere.
It isn’t the mere fumes of modernity that motivate Protestants here but rather the exclusion of the supernatural from the material world and the relegation of the supernatural to the interior which is endemic to Protestantism, ironically along monastic, Stoic and Platonic lines. The Reformed move of viewing salvation as a restoration to a natural state, rather than the Augustinian structure of seeing grace as added to nature, motivates the move to find something in nature that is oriented to deity in and of itself. Modernity or no modernity, thats a problem is within the Reformed system.
I am all for people doing serious study, but let’s be honest. Most Protestants, particularly those who defected from Catholicism didn’t do any serious study as here is being recommended. And Protestant bodies of all stripes are only too happy to take them. So this looks like a bit of special pleading. I seriously doubt you’d hand out copies of Francis De Sales anti-Calvinist tracts to enquirers from Catholicism at your church.
It is quite true that the corner is not solely occupied by the Orthodox. Lutherans, Anglicans, Catholics, Copts and other traditions have great traditions of religious art and iconophile devotional practices. All of them do save the Anabaptists. The relevant point is that the Reformed do not occupy that corner, however large the corner is because of their iconoclasm. At the end of the day, that isn’t a corner. We should also note that 2nd Nicea represents the judgment of the whole church at the time and for a very long time.
And yet people bowed to the Temple. Bowed to each other and so on. The question is, how is the prohibition on bowing to be understood and whose judgment on that question is authoritative as far as what the teaching of the church is supposed to be.
It would take many centuries before a canon of the bible was formulated too, therefore there is no permissible canon today? Wut? Where does the NT mandate a canon? Women taking communion?
And why does the NT depict Christ with words as in Revelation? How are word pictures ok, but not actual pictures? Gal 3 anyone?
And how about carrying around a picture of your wife? Are people who venerate a picture of a dead loved one at a funeral commit idolatry? Do impressionistic works of art of historical figures express the person or no? If they fail, why do they fail? What does it take to denote and express a person in art? That is, does art work have to be a photograph to denote and express a hypostasis? Your claim seems to be that it can’t because it isn’t sufficiently accurate, but there seems to be no argument here to support that claim. And without it, your argument seems to fail.
Lots of things were not either instituted from the beginning or we do not have expressions of them until after the apostles. That hardly implies that they are in principle forbidden or insufficiently grounded.
A robust incarnational Protestantism, cough, that excludes any representation of divine from worship except the internal and interior? Wut? Robustly incarnational while limited to your psychological innards. Protestant divines weren’t interested in Stoicism for nothing.
The “best” of the Christian tradition isn’t iconophile? Uhm, how is this not simply question begging? Best according to those who dissent from the judgment of the whole church?
And we have iconic representation in the third century. How much earlier do they need to be to carry evidentiary weight?
And the iconodule argument is not that the making and venerating of images was intended to be a “central part of the ministry of the Church.” That seems very much like a strawman. Lots of apostolically intended things are not central, but apostolic nonetheless. Did the apostles intend for the church to continue without global apostasy?
Toby says
Perry, thanks for the comment. Don’t have time to respond to everything you’ve written, but there are a lot of generalizations here that need more nuance to do the actual history justice. For just one example, none of what I’ve written is necessarily at odds with bowing to the temple and bowing to people. Both are places where God explicitly promised to be. That’s the matter with which Nicaea II is concerned. Is there warrant for believing that an icon of Jesus is a place Jesus has promised to be (in some sense)? Nicaea II said “yes” since the icon accurately portrays the man, Jesus of Nazareth. But is that true? And to your point about accuracy, I certainly grant that an artistic continuum exists between a photograph and more symbolic art. But it was Theodore who insisted that icons are not symbols. He said that when the resemblance has faded from the icon, the icon should be tossed in the trash. So it’s the Orthodox who insist on some degree of accuracy. So I’m just pressing that question: is that true? Do we have reason to believe the icon of Jesus truly resembles the man of Nazareth? Cheers.
Perry C Robinson says
Toby,
I think my generalizations are apt, just as you think yours are apt.
Do you promise to be in pictures of yourself? Artwork denoting yourself?
I agree that icons are not symbols, in the way Theodore understood the term. From that it does not follow that they are photographs or aiming to be so. You seem to be assuming that they are. Why think that?
Your argument seems to go something like this (please correct me if this is not your argument).
His argument seems to go something like this.
1. Icons cannot sufficiently resemble what Jesus looked like.
2. If icons cannot sufficiently resemble what Jesus looked like, then they can’t denote his hypostasis.
3. If icons can’t denote Jesus’ hypostasis, then veneration of them is not licensed.
Toby says
Perry, The argument you outline is close but not quite accurate. My argument is not that icons *cannot* sufficiently resemble what Jesus looked like. My argument is that all the historical indications are that they *do not*. In that case, your points two and three follow, again not because icons *cannot* resemble/denote but because there are many indications that they *do not*. My question for my Orthodox brothers is whether sufficient energy has been spent in defending the historical resemblance of Jesus in icons since that is (apparently) what Theodore argued for and Nicaea II subsequently affirmed. In my article, I accept for the sake argument Nicaea’s point, but my question is whether icons truly bear the hypostasis (general historic resemblance suitable to the art form). Thanks and cheers.
Perry C Robinson says
Toby,
You write, “The 7th Ecumenical Council says that it’s right to venerate icons of Christ because they depict Him accurately.”
Do you have a textual reference and quotation to support this claim?
Toby says
From Nicaea II: “… he who venerates the image, venerates the person (hypostasis) represented in that image.”
Perry C Robinson says
Toby,
I am not seeing language there about accurate depiction or anything that expresses that idea. All I am seeing is an expression of the idea that veneration is aimed at the hypostasis. So i have to ask, where is the idea expressed by 2nd Nicea that “it’s right to venerate icons of Christ because they depict Him accurately?”
Perry C Robinson says
Toby,
We can modify the argument from cannot, to, do not.
Again, though your argument turns on what constitutes resemblance and what it means to denote in art.
As I noted previously, your question is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because you are assuming that denoting a hypostasis in art is done through a kind of pictographic representation. I’ve read Theodore and lots of other works on the subject and I don’t see them expressing that idea. And nothing you’ve presented supports that they did. Consequently your argument seems to be a strawman. So again, premise 2 is objectionable and unsupported.
So again, this turns on, what it means for 2nd Nicea and its defenders to “represent.”
Kevin says
Toby, what in the world are you doing? You have chosen to select 12 words from a sentence that contains many, many more… And the words that come before your quotation certainly alter the meaning of the few that you chose to quote.
You can’t do that. Quote the entire sentence, or don’t quote anything at all.
Nathan Classen says
For clarity’s sake, here is a portion of the text of Nicaea II.
It seems a stretch to argue that Nicaea II itself is arguing, that icons of our Lord ought to be venerated if and only if they accurately depict him; such as a modern photograph would.
It appears quite clear that the purpose of the quoted portion is actually meant to make clear, that the painting itself is not venerated, but that veneration is performed toward the actual one represented.
Nicaea II goes on to state in no uncertain terms, that this is not worship. The analogy offered above, that of kissing the photo of ones spouse, indeed is quite apt and seems to get at Nicaea properly on this point.
It is also quite striking, to this Orthodox leaning Presby, with what conviction and force the council spoke against iconoclasm.
” The more frequently they are seen in representational art, the more are those who see them drawn to remember and long for those who serve as models, and to pay these images the tribute of salutation and respectful veneration.
Certainly this is not the full adoration {latria} in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature, but it resembles that given to the figure of the honoured and life-giving cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred cult objects.
Further, people are drawn to honour these images with the offering of incense and lights, as was piously established by ancient custom.
Indeed, the honour paid to an image traverses it, reaching the model, and he who venerates the image, venerates the person represented [notice, not ‘accurately depicted’] in that image.
So it is that the teaching of our holy fathers is strengthened, namely, the tradition of the catholic church which has received the gospel from one end of the earth to the other.
So it is that we really follow Paul, who spoke in Christ, and the entire divine apostolic group and the holiness of the fathers, clinging fast to the traditions which we have received.
So it is that we sing out with the prophets the hymns of victory to the church: Rejoice exceedingly O daughter of Zion, proclaim O daughter of Jerusalem; enjoy your happiness and gladness with a full heart. The Lord has removed away from you the injustices of your enemies, you have been redeemed from the hand of your foes. The Lord the king is in your midst, you will never more see evil, and peace will be upon you for time eternal.
Therefore all those who dare to think or teach anything different, or who follow the accursed heretics in rejecting ecclesiastical traditions, or who devise innovations, or who spurn anything entrusted to the church (whether it be the gospel or the figure of the cross or any example of representational art or any martyr’s holy relic), or who fabricate perverted and evil prejudices against cherishing any of the lawful traditions of the catholic church, or who secularize the sacred objects and saintly monasteries, we order that they be suspended if they are bishops or clerics, and excommunicated if they are monks or lay people.
Anathemas concerning holy images
If anyone does not confess that Christ our God can be represented in his humanity, let him be anathema.
If anyone does not accept representation in art of evangelical scenes, let him be anathema.
If anyone does not salute such representations as standing for the Lord and his saints, let him be anathema.
If anyone rejects any written or unwritten tradition of the church, let him be anathema. “