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Saints - Pascha Cycle - Icons of God

The Restoration of the Holy Icons at the 7th Ecumenical Council

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Setting the Scene

The Iconoclastic controversy lasted from 726, when Emperor Leo III (717-741) began an attack on the use of the holy icons until 843 when The Empress Theodora allowed their restoration. The two periods of Iconoclasm were separated by the reign of the iconodule Empress Irene, under whom the Second Council of Nicaea 787 was held.  A number of defenses of Icons were made: based on the existence of Divinely approved images in nature and Scripture; based on the reality of the incarnation; and based on a Platonic metaphysics of ascending images which participated in the prototype.  Foremost contributor to the debate at the time was St. John of Damascus, Orthodox defender of the holy icons.   St. John was able to write freely since lived under Muslim rule outside the boundaries of the Byzantine emperor.  One of his arguments concerned the holiness of matter and it is to this we now turn.

From St. John of Damascus (On the Divine Images, First Apology no. 16)

"In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honouring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honour it, but not as God. How could God be born out of things which have no existence in themselves? God's body is God because it is joined to His person by a union which shall never pass away. The divine nature remains the same; the flesh created in time is quickened by a reason-endowed soul. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with His grace and power."

This is the Orthodox Christian approach to the material world, veneration.  Orthodox often find themselves in western post-Christian cultures where there is a very different approach to matter; or rather two approaches, both of them heretical. 

The first we might characterise as matter stripped of spirit.  Here, the material world loses its contact with the divine.  The material world may safely be plundered and human bodies effectively treated as so much "meat" or even genetically determined machinery to be tinkered with at will.   The second heresy concerns the worship of the material world in the perspective of hedonism or the religosity of the pantheistic aspects of the New Age movement.

By contrast, Orthodox Christianity venerates the material world as grace-bearing; first and foremost in the sacred Person of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate (enfleshed) Word of God and by extension toward all disclosures of the divine energies under physical form ranging from the Holy Mysteries to the poor whom we serve; from the lowliest speck of dust to the whole Cosmos.

The celebration of the restoration of the holy icons which we mark in October's feast of the Father's of the Seventh Ecumenical Council is not only a liturgical matter but a lifting up of matter as holy.  Fundamentally, the Fathers were articulating a full bodied creation theology at this Council.  They looked upon matter as God's handiwork and declared it "good."  In honouring them and their witness, Orthodox Christians must do all in their power and by divine grace to be priests of God's creation.  By word and deed we honour matter when we cherish each other and the whole earth as vehicles of God himself.

The impact of the icons on the veneration of the saints in Orthodox Christianity has been profound.  Since Christ is the True Icon of God and since his friends, the saints are derivatively the restored images of God as being redeemed by Him, the faithful may also acquire a likeness unto God in whose image all humans are made.  The holy icons remind us therefore of what we by the grace of God might become, that is, glorified, divinised.

Practical

Assemble (if you have not already done so) your favourite home icons, prayer book, lights, holy water and other holy things for your icon prayer corner at home.  Use this place as a prayer retreat personally and (where practical) a place also where the family gathers to pray.  Allow your icon corner to become your "domestic Church" but first let the divine image be renewed by the grace and operation of the Holy Spirit in your own heart and mind.

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