What We Have Seen-Part I

The Orthodox Theological Response to the Iconoclast Crisis

In the year AD 725 Emperor Leo III issued an edict forbidding the use of images in Christian worship igniting nearly a century of unrest, vandalism, and intensive theological activity and debate known as ‘Iconoclasm’ (literally ‘the image-smashing). In their defense of Orthodoxy, the fathers of the Church developed a theology of sacred art profoundly rooted in Scripture, conciliar, and liturgical/pietistic Tradition. This defense of icons was codified at the Second Council of Nicaea (AD 787) which was ultimately recognized as the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

Iconoclasts and iconophiles (the lover of images) both regarded themselves as the authentic voice of Orthodoxy, thus both sides bolstered their respective arguments with Scripture. For the Iconoclasts, icons were a violation of the Second Commandment (LXX listing) which states “You shall not make for yourself an idol…You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God…” (Ex. 20:4a, 5a). Upon Scriptural testimony, the iconoclasts argued that the making and use of images were simply immoral. Because of such a palpable transgression of the Divine Law so they reasoned—God had punitively abandoned the Christian Empire leaving it powerless to halt the militant advance of Islam. Iconoclasm, in its most fundamental and political expression, was rationalized as a necessary and scriptural reform that would bring the Church to divine obedience and restore divine favor to Christian Rome (the Byzantine Empire).

The defenders of icons—St. John of Damascus (AD 670-749) chief among them—likewise rooted the Orthodox response to iconoclasm in Scripture, but in an exegetically penetrating reading of the pertinent texts. Israel in the Old Covenant was indeed forbidden to practice idolatry but a careful and complete reading of the Scripture in no way invalidates the practice of the Church. John points out that a surface reading presents an apparent contradiction: God both forbids and commands (Mosaic Tabernacle, cf. Exod. 31:1-6, 35:4-10) the making and use of images in Israel’s worship. For John, the meaning of the stipulation against a divine image given in Deuteronomy 4:1-40 resolves this contradiction. God is not forbidding the making of images as such, but the making of His image for he reveals no form. The meaning of the ban is to prevent Israel from falling into idolatry.¹ In the context of worship (Tabernacle and Temple) Israel is commanded to represent (make graven images of) a variety of things forming a complex matrix of symbolic images wherein only the image of God is gloriously absent. When read against the whole of Scripture, this unseen presence of the divine image is pregnant with christological significance and charged with expectation.  Man is the image of God, and because of the distortion of that image (due to sin) it is no longer licet or safe for man to image/depict God on his own initiative. To do so would implicitly be a distortion that would lead man further into bondage (i.e. idolatry). The unveiling of God’s image is His own exclusive prerogative and will—in the continuity of the Divine Economy—be in the form of a restored humanity. God the Word² revealed no form on Saini to protect and prepared His covenant people to behold Him in the fullness of His self-disclosure.

Jesus of Nazareth is that restored human nature, the very image of the invisible God (cf. Col. 1:15) resplendent in the divine likeness. Moses rightly forbids any divine image because before the incarnation there was nothing to see:

It is obvious that when you contemplate God becoming man, then you may depict Him clothed in human form. When the invisible One becomes visible to flesh, you may then draw His likeness. When He who is bodiless and without form, immeasurable in the boundlessness of His own nature, existing in the form of God, empties Himself and takes the form of a servant in substance and in stature and is found in a body of flesh, then you may draw His image and show it to anyone willing to gaze upon it. Depict His wonderful condescension.³

The people of God can no longer say, we “saw no form” (Deut.4:12), for “Israel of old did not see God, but ‘we all, with unveiled face, behold the glory of the Lord’” (2 Cor. 3:18).⁴ Thus John can say “I make an image of the God whom I see.”⁵ The Incarnation radically modifies the Old Covenant stipulation by fulfilling its purpose.

This theology of the incarnation at the heart of the orthodox defense of icons unescapably led into the domain of the Christological controversies which had raged in Byzantine society for the better part of four centuries. Both parties regarded their position as expressing the faith of the Ecumenical Counsels; thus both sought to contextualize their respective positions within conciliar orthodoxy. For the Iconoclasts any depiction of Christ is necessarily a depiction of his human nature (the divine being invisible): thus to paint Christ is inescapably to divide him.  Images are inherently (or explicitly) ‘Nestorian’.

The orthodox response was also well rooted in conciliar theology, and like its exegesis, provided a more penetrating and comprehensive theological vision wherein the doctrine of Chalcedon (AD 451) would prove decisive. The post-Nicaean Christological debates can be seen largely as a dispute between two different schools of exegesis with Christological implications. The Alexandrian school with its spiritualized interpretations of Scripture was prone to reducing the historicity of the texts and thus of Christ, absorbing everything that is ‘carnal’ in Christ into the divine. Monophysitism is the most radical Christological expression of this tendency. Likewise, the thought of the Levant and Mesopotamia (the Antiochian school), so steeped in the history of Scripture, placed tremendous emphasis on the historicity and literal sense of the text often to the exclusion of spiritual meaning. Nestorianism is the most radical Christological expression of this tendency. Chalcedon with its Christology of two natures in one person (the hypostatic union) validated the insights and true motivations of both schools but guarded against erroneous exaggerations.

In Jesus Christ, we truly see God, not because the essence of the divine nature becomes accessible to our eyes, but because we behold a Divine ‘person’ who has a human nature. For “God’s body is God because it is joined to His person by a union which shall never pass away.”⁶ When we paint Christ we are painting a picture of a person, and like any painting, it is of what we can see. This is no rejection, denial, or division of the unseeable reality; for, to see only Christ’s humanity is not a hindrance to recognizing his divinity. Again as St. John of Damascus explains:

Fleshly nature was not lost when it became part of the Godhead, but as the Word made flesh remained the Word, so also flesh became the Word, yet remained flesh, being united to the person of the Word. Therefore, I boldly draw an image of the invisible God, not as invisible, but as having become visible for our sake by partaking of flesh and blood.⁷

For the Church does not cling to Christ’s earthly existence alone, but knows him as ascended to the Father (cf. John 20:17, also 2 Cor.5:16), in the light of faith (cf. Matt. 16:17) which can behold his incarnate flesh and recognize the Lord (cf. John 20:28). It is to this experience of his incarnation—what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—that she invites humanity to fellowship within (cf. 1 John 1:1-4). Icons are an expression of the faith of the Church, an affirmation of the Councils.   

The shallow reading of Scripture and the hollow charge of long-abandoned ‘Nestorianism’ on the part of the Iconoclasts only serve to reveal the true impetus behind the controversy. Iconoclasm was a struggle between a re-emergent anti-materialistic Christian Neo-Platonism and Christian materialism rooted in the Incarnation. It did not arise in a historical vacuum, but in the context of a fundamental shift in Byzantine piety wherein liturgical attitudes, theories, practices, and rituals from the Holy Land were fully integrated within Byzantine Rite.  For reasons not entirely historically understood—though it is likely due to an influx of refugees fleeing the solidifying Islamic Political State (Caliphate)—the liturgy of the State Church (the Byzantine Rite) began its last major phase of development. A whole system of liturgical symbolism, hymnography, and piety from the Holy Land was absorbed into the Liturgy of Constantinople wherein the prominence of historicity, materiality, and thus images (which, along with relics) were greatly amplified.⁸ The orthodox defense of icons was a defense of this (new) piety which highlighted the place of Christian materialism.

St. Germanus the Patriarch of Constantinople (AD 635-733)—the first high-ranking ecclesial victim of Iconoclasm, deposed as patriarch by the author of political iconoclasm, Emperor Leo III—is regarded as the key figure in this shift, his widely influential commentary on the Divine Liturgy “Ecclesiastical History and Mystical Contemplation” being its classical theological expression. For Germanus, the real Christological danger facing the Church of his time was no longer Arianism, but monophysitism, the rejection of Christ’s full humanity. Thus Germanus fundamentally challenges the

strong spiritualizing trend so characteristic of Origen...[and the] typically Alexandrian focus on the divinity of Christ…[wherein] deification is achieved through ethical imitation of the perfection of the incarnate Logos. The historical Jesus, while not denied, fades into the background.⁹

The patriarch theologically validated and popularized the new piety as the vehicle by which Chalcedonian balance could be manifest in the heart of the Church’s life. Indeed, St. Germanus understood immediately that the attack on images was a reactionary attack on the new synthesis he was engaged in bringing forth.¹⁰

To achieve this he took up (in the light of Chalcedon) traditional methods of scriptural exegeses (ἱστορία—historia/ θεωρια—theoria) and employed them in the interpretation of liturgy. The largely Alexandrian approach to liturgy as the ‘journey of the spiritual nous’ was “no longer fully adequate: more attention had to be paid to the historical man, Jesus.”¹¹ Just as the fleshly history of Jesus cannot be divided from his divinity, so to the materiality of Christian worship cannot be divided from its spiritual reality. No longer could the liturgy be seen as,

a means for contemplation of the Divine Unity, with little room for the concrete…[but must] connect the words and actions of the liturgy to the history of salvation…to pull the observer into salvation history…[as]a participant in it.¹²

In this balanced theology,

historia focuses on the reality of the self-revelation of God in Christ [fully present in the liturgical/sacramental materiality of the Church, hence the term ‘ecclesiastical history’]: theoria [mystical contemplation] attempts to lead the graced person to the reality that is God.¹³

The historicity of the God-man and the materiality of the Liturgical-sacrament are indispensably linked, Salvation History and the Sacramental Economy form but a single Oikonomia.

1. Cf. John of Damascus, On Divine Images, 1; 6, 7

2. The Fathers (including John) understood that the theophanies of the Old Testament are not revelations of God the Father but rather the second person of the Trinity. Yahweh of revelation is identified as the pre-incarnate Logos.

3. On Divine Images, 1; 8.

4. Cf. On Divine Images,1; 16.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.,1, 4.

8. The connection between the shift of piety, the growing importance of images, and the rise of Iconoclasm is explored at length in Robert Taft’s classic essay in liturgical scholarship “The Liturgy of the Great Church: An Initial Synthesis of Structure and Interpretation on the Eve of Iconoclasm,” in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34-35. (Washington, D.C.: University, 1981).

9. Paul Meyendorff, ‘Introduction’ to St Germanus of Constantinople: On the Divine Liturgy, 28.

10. Cf. Christoph Schonborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ Icon. Trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 179-185.

11. Meyendorff, Ibid. 48.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.