This past Sunday, the Eastern Church celebrated the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which commemorates the Seventh Ecumenical Council and its defense of the use of images in Christian worship. The iconoclast party which initiated the controversy charged that icons were tantamount to idols and, therefore, that their use by Christians was tantamount to idolatry. Sadly, this charge is somewhat repeated by certain Protestant denominations, which proves that the last chapter of the iconoclast controversy has yet to be written.
But the controversy over icons and the Ecumenical Council which defended their use is about far more than simply defending a Christian tradition. The iconoclasts made two charges: first, that icons breached the Second Commandment and led to breaking the First, and that God could not be depicted materially. The first charge is scriptural, and the Council answered it by pointing out that God directed Moses to depict two Cherubim overshadowing the Mercy Seat atop the Arc of the Covenant (Ex. 25:19) and make further depictions on the curtains of the tabernacle (Ex. 26:1). Additionally, the Council pointed out that idols are depictions of false gods and it is precisely for this reason that they are forbidden.
However, a further argument can be made. After the Kingdom of Israel split, Jeroboam, the King of the Northern Kingdom, was concerned that his people’s reliance on the Temple in Jerusalem would ultimately reunite the kingdoms, and that was something he was not prepared to grant. Thus, Jeroboam built a temple in Penuel, adorned it with two golden calves, and directed his people to worship there rather than in Jerusalem (1 Kgs. 12:25-31). It is important to note that this temple was built to worship the God of Israel, not a false god. The motif of the golden calves is not new: some of the Hebrews made a golden calf in Exodus (Ex. 32:1-4) in an attempt to honor the God of Israel. In both cases, God condemned them. So, it would seem that God condemned depictions of Himself as such, not just those of false gods.
This is the logic behind the second charge. Regardless of the intention behind it, to make an image of God is necessarily to make an idol, because it is impossible to depict Him, who is utterly unlike anything in creation. Moses may have been directed to make some images, but none of God.
This is certainly true. But then, God did something amazing. The undepictable became depictable. In the Incarnation, God took on matter and in so doing, obtained visible form. By depicting Christ, we depict God faithfully. To say that images of Christ only portray Christ’s human nature is to attempt to rend the hypostatic union. A depiction of Christ’s body entails His soul and His divinity in the same way that a depiction of my body is a depiction of me, my entire person; what can be depicted entails what cannot be depicted, my soul. When what is visible in Christ is depicted, therefore, the whole Christ is entailed and the whole Christ is depicted.
St. John of Damascus, however, points out that there is much more to it than that. In taking on a body, God has made a small portion of matter worthy of worship. We worship the physical body of Christ because the glory, which belongs by nature to the divinity, overflowed and sanctified the soul and the body which the Logos assumed when He took on a human nature. In worshipping the Creator, we worship that small portion of matter which He took to Himself and consecrated and that has implications for the rest of the material world. Matter is capax Dei (capable of knowing and receiving God). This is the principle behind the Sacraments, that God can imbue Himself in matter and give us access to Himself. The finite is capable of the infinite not because of any feature of the finite, but because God can permeate through anything in His creation. The Eastern insistence on the use of images not only for instruction, but for veneration, hinges on precisely this point: that wood and paint can be set aside and dedicated to the worship of God and, in so doing, can become points of access to God, or, to put it more poetically, windows into Heaven itself.
Gjergji Evangjeli served as the Editor-In-Chief of The Torch. He had previously served as the Executive Editor and the World News section editor. He is currently pursuing a ThM at the BC School of Theology and Ministry. Gjergji is interested in the patristic period, specifically in the apologists of the second century. He is an ardent defender of the Oxford comma.
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