Why Orthodoxy

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Chapter 06 of 12 · The case for Orthodoxy

Icons, Veneration, and the Seventh Council

The Orthodox veneration of icons is not a medieval accretion; it is the settled dogma of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787), which drew on the oldest practice of the Church and on the witness of the Fathers, above all John of Damascus. Here is the full dogmatic and historical grounding.

The form. The article concerns the holy images. The objections are the strongest statements of iconoclasm, ancient and modern; the sed contra is drawn from the Scriptures the iconoclasts themselves cited, from the ancient practice, and from the Seventh Council; the determination and replies follow.

Whether holy images of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Mother of God, and of the saints may lawfully be made and venerated with relative honour, and whether such veneration belongs to the faith of the Church.

Objections to the Orthodox position

  1. Obj. 1 — From the Second Commandment and the earliest canons. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image…" (Exodus 20:4). The Council of Elvira (c. 305), canon 36, is older than Nicaea II by almost five centuries: "there shall be no pictures in the church, lest what is worshipped and adored be painted on the walls." Eusebius of Caesarea, writing to Constantia, refused a portrait of Christ. The iconoclast synod of Hieria (754) and the Frankish Libri Carolini (c. 793) — written against Nicaea II, with papal legates later having to defend the Seventh Council to the Franks — show that resistance to images is not a Protestant invention.1
  2. Obj. 2 — From the indistinguishability of practice. The Church bows before icons, kisses them, burns incense, lights candles — the very worship due to God; the distinction between proskynesis (relative veneration) and latreia (absolute worship) is a verbal device that the ordinary faithful cannot make, and that the East itself does not make in practice. If it walks, talks, and smells like worship, it is worship, and it borders on idolatry.2
  3. Obj. 3 — From the lateness of the cult. Veneration of images is absent from the apostolic record; it grew up in the fourth–sixth centuries; Nicaea II (787) was overturned by the iconoclast council of 815; and the West's own great reformers and the entire Reformation rejected it. A practice so contested, so local, and so late cannot be a dogma of the catholic faith.3

On the contrary

The same God who forbade graven images as idols commanded images as ornaments of His own worship: the cherubim of gold over the mercy seat, into which He promised to meet and commune with Moses (Exodus 25:18–22); the cherubim and palm-trees carved and overlaid in Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 6:23–35); and the bronze serpent, a commanded image of a heavenly thing, made by God's own order the instrument of healing (Numbers 21:8–9), which Christ took as his type ("as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up," John 3:14).4 And to the objection "but no one has seen God": "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and "he is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15).5 And the ancient Church, summoned to battle, sealed it in the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787): the holy images are to be set up — of our Lord, of the spotless Mother of God, of the angels and all saints — and to them is due "salutation and honourable reverence (ἀσπασμὸν καὶ τιμητικὴν προσκύνησιν), not indeed that true worship of faith (λατρείαν) which pertains alone to the divine nature… For the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the subject represented."6

I answer that

The controversy is ancient and recurrent, and it is always the same controversy, because it is always the same error in a new dress: the error that matter separates the soul from God instead of serving as the vehicle of His grace — an error that denies the Incarnation while claiming to defend it. The Church's answer is therefore equally unchanging, and it has three parts.

First, the Scriptural answer completes rather than evades the Commandment. The Commandment forbids the worship of images as gods — "thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them" — and the proof that this, and not image-making, is the sin is that the very same legislation commands images in the tabernacle and the Temple, and that the bronze serpent God commanded became an idol only when it was no longer an image of redemption but an object of worship on its own — whereupon the faithful king Hezekiah broke it (2 Kings 18:4). The distinction is thus not a casuistry invented by the Seventh Council; it is the whole difference between the cherubim and the golden calf, and it is written in the Law the iconoclasts cite.7

Second, the Incarnation changes the situation of image-making absolutely. Here is the exact logic of the Fathers, above all John of Damascus, writing in the face of the first iconoclasm: in former times God was bodiless and formless, and could not be depicted; but now God has appeared in the flesh — has a face, a body, a history — and the refusal to depict Him is, in the last analysis, a refusal of His real flesh. "I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material and deigned to dwell in matter, and through matter worked my salvation."8 The icon of Christ is, in this sense, a confession: a statement that the Word really took a depictable body, was seen, handled, crucified, risen — and that the Gospel is not a myth of a bodiless deity. The iconoclast, however pious, unwittingly confesses that God must remain unseen to remain God: which is Manichaeism in prayer and Docetism in Christology, however orthodox in profession.9

Third, the Church defined the exact limits of the practice, and they have never been moved. The Seventh Council, whose definition was received East and West (the papal legates were present), binds the faithful to relative honour (proskynesis) of the images and to absolute worship (latreia) of God alone; the honour passes to the prototype; and the practice is grounded, as the decree insists, in "the tradition of the Catholic Church, which from one end of the earth to the other has received the Gospel." The same principle had been the Fathers': "the honour shown to the image passes to the prototype" (Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 18.45, quoted by the Council itself).10 The history demonstrates the antiquity the objection denies: the catacombs of Rome, the mosaics, and the carved sarcophagi of the third–fifth centuries are dense with Christian images (not yet panel icons in the later technical sense); the surviving encaustic icon of Christ at Sinai and the documented Image of Edessa (the Mandylion, first securely attested in the sixth century as acheiropoietos, not made by hands) show a mature cult of the holy image before the controversy. St. Germanus of Constantinople, writing before the outbreak of iconoclasm, already defends images "in perpetual remembrance of the Lord's incarnation." The iconoclastic "recovery" was a rupture, not a return.11

Two clarifications, for fairness and for truth. First, the Roman Church also received Nicaea II and never rejected icons; the Orthodox-Catholic division on images is therefore not a division at all in the way the Filioque is — though the West's later naturalism (which paints the saints as mere persons) and its practical confusion of veneration with devotion have often blurred, in the West's own practice, the line the Seventh Council drew. Second, the Orthodox veneration of icons is not the "worship of images" of popular caricature; it is, in its own theology, a form of the communion of saints — a window, not an idol, and the whole art of the icon — its gold, its absence of shadow, its inverted perspective — exists to say: the saints live in the uncreated light of the Resurrected, and the faithful are drawn into that light (Matthew 17:1–8).12

The answer to the article, then, is this: images of God and His saints are lawful because God commanded images in His own sanctuary; they are obligatory in the era of the Incarnation because the Word became visible; they are venerated — not worshipped — with relative honour, on the dogma of the Seventh Council; and their veneration is not an optional devotion but a permanent confession, in colour and gold, of the Resurrection and the deification of the flesh. The Church that broke the icons broke her confession; the Church that keeps them keeps the Incarnation with them.

Replies to the objections

  1. Reply to Obj. 1. The Commandment forbids idols, not images; the Law itself commands images, and the Incarnation completes the law. The cherubim, the Temple carving, and the bronze serpent (Exodus 25; 1 Kings 6; Numbers 21) are images commanded by God in the very covenant that contains the Decalogue; and 2 Kings 18:4 shows the Church's exact principle: the serpent was an image until it became an idol, and then it was rightly broken. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9); the Word made flesh (John 1:14) is depictable; the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15) is the ground of all Christian image-making. The objection mistakes the idolatry the Commandment forbids for the imagery the Law itself appoints.13
  2. Reply to Obj. 2. That veneration is easily abused proves the need of dogma, not its absence; and the Church distinguishes with the precision of the Seventh Council. The Council's own definition — proskynesis of honour, latria of worship, honour to the prototype — is addressed precisely to the confusion the objection describes, and it is a dogma, not a "verbal device": the Church does not worship the wood; she honours the person through the image, exactly as the Law honoured the cherubim without worshipping them. Abuse is possible (the Council's subsequent decrees legislate against it); the answer to abuse is teaching, not iconoclasm — which, as the Church observed, is the method of a man who burns his house because he keeps a fire.14
  3. Reply to Obj. 3. The "lateness" is disproven by the archaeology, and the "reversal" (815) was itself reversed, and never again. The catacomb art and the Sinai icons antedate the controversy by centuries; Nicaea II (787) was followed by an iconoclast interlude (815–843) of emperors, not of the Church, and the Church's verdict of 843 — the Triumph of Orthodoxy, kept to this day — has never been reversed by any council of the Church. The Reformation's revival of iconoclasm is a sixteenth-century event, not an apostolic one, and it was rejected even by the Catholic West that had received Nicaea II. What the objection calls novelty is, on the record, the oldest practice of the Church and the settled dogma of her Seventh Council.15

Citations for this chapter

  1. Exodus 20:4 (KJV): Exodus 20:4. Council of Elvira, canon 36 (c. 305): text in standard canon collections; survey Wikipedia: Synod of Elvira. Eusebius to Constantia: discussed in the Acts of Nicaea II and in Wikipedia: Byzantine Iconoclasm. Libri Carolini / Caroline Books: Catholic Encyclopedia, newadvent.org/cathen/06236a.htm.
  2. The indistinguishability objection is the permanent iconoclast charge, restated by the Reformers; for the Church's reply in definition, see fn. 6 (Nicaea II).
  3. The "latent" and "local" objections and the second iconoclasm (815): Wikipedia: Byzantine Iconoclasm.
  4. Exodus 25:18–22; 1 Kings 6:23–35; Numbers 21:8–9; John 3:14 (KJV): Exodus 25:18–22.
  5. John 1:14; Colossians 1:15 (KJV): Colossians 1:15.
  6. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II (787), Definition of the holy, great, and ecumenical Synod, trans. Henry R. Percival, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 14: newadvent.org/fathers/3819.htm. The Greek terms are in the decree itself; the sentence quoted is the Council's dogmatic formula, drawn from Basil (fn. 10).
  7. 2 Kings 18:4 (Hezekiah breaks the bronze serpent become idol): biblegateway.com. The distinction between cherubim and calf is the standard patristic answer, stated by John of Damascus and the Seventh Council.
  8. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.16, trans. Andrew Louth (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2003); Greek: PG 94.
  9. The Christological argument of iconoclasm's consequences (implicit Docetism) is made by John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons (trans. C. Roth, SVS Press, 1981); the site's own formulation follows theirs.
  10. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 18.45: newadvent.org/fathers/3203.htm; the sentence is quoted verbatim in the Nicaea II decree (fn. 6).
  11. Catacomb frescoes (3rd–4th c.); Sinai Christ (6th c.): Kurt Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons (Princeton, 1976). Image of Edessa / Mandylion: first securely attested mid-6th c. Germanus of Constantinople, letters on images (c. 725–730). Quinisext canon 82 (692) already requires Christ depicted in human form, not only as a lamb: newadvent.org/fathers/3814.htm. Survey: OrthodoxWiki: Iconography.
  12. The theology of the icon's style and the light of Tabor: Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon (1990); Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon (SVS, 1992); Matthew 17:1–8 (KJV): Matthew 17:1–8.
  13. Exodus 25:18–22; Numbers 21:8–9; 1 Kings 6:23–35; 2 Kings 18:4; John 1:14; 14:9; Colossians 1:15: fns. 4–5, 7.
  14. Nicaea II decree (fn. 6); the Council's own subsequent legislation against abuses shows it legislated for the confusion the objection raises rather than abolishing veneration.
  15. The archaeology (fn. 11); the second iconoclasm and the restoration of 843: OrthodoxWiki: Sunday of Orthodoxy; the Reformation iconoclasm is sixteenth-century history, and Trent (1563) reaffirmed the veneration of images (Session 25): hanover.edu.