From Sampler to Sower

No one could describe the Word of the Father;
But when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos,
He consented to be described,
And restored the fallen image to its former state by uniting it to divine beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images.
(Kontakion on the Triumph of Orthodoxy)

Chances are you probably didn’t sing that hymn in worship yesterday. Let’s face it, chances are, you didn’t even know that yesterday was the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Yet Christians around the world who worship in congregations that are part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition celebrated what is, in their estimation at least, one of the most significant events of Church history: the Seventh Ecumenical Council, also known as Nicea II.

Let me save you a trip to your church history books. The seven truly Ecumenical Councils were synods held by the Church to which bishops from the whole of Christendom were called to wrestle with heresies confronting Christianity and to define the boundaries of orthodoxy.  (The Roman Catholic church considers 21 councils to be ecumenical; the Eastern Orthodox church only acknowledges seven.  It seems hard for me to consider any council not affirmed by both East and West to be truly ecumenical.  Either way, however, both main streams of Christianity consider Nicea II to be an Ecumenical Council.)

This council predated not only the Protestant reformation, it predated the Great Schism itself. It is a truly Ecumenical council, an event that all Christianity shares. In other words, this isn’t just their history. It is our history. And the truth it defended has profound implications for our theology and liturgical practice. Here’s why:

The seven Ecumenical Councils dealt with truly weighty issues of vital importance to the Church.  The first, Nicea I, for example wrestled with the issue of Arianism (Jesus wasn’t divine, but was rather the first created). At stake was nothing less than the doctrine of the Trinity itself, and to this day the Church affirms this council’s great statement of faith, the Nicean Creed.

The third, the council of Ephesus confronted Nestorianism, the attempt to explain the mystery of the incarnation by arguing that there were actually two persons – the human Jesus and the divine Logos – that resided inside Jesus Christ. No, said the council. Jesus Christ was not only fully human and fully God, he was fully integrated, two natures in one person.

The Fourth, the council of Chalcedon, wrestled with the heresy of Monophysitism, the idea that, in Jesus, the human nature is so fully absorbed into the divine nature that in Jesus there was really only one nature (mono-physis), the divine. Jesus, who was fully human, became fully divine.  This was rejected by the Fourth Ecumenical Council, and the corresponding Chalcedonian creed says that Jesus is “to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”

Heady stuff, I know.  But also critically important to our understanding of both the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Yet none of these creed-writing councils is celebrated to this day as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.  That auspicious title is reserved for the Seventh Council.

What weighty crisis threatened the foundations of Christianity so profoundly that Orthodoxy could not triumph until it was settled?

The Triumph over Iconoclasm

The issue at stake for the Seventh Ecumenical Council was the proper role for icons (images) in the life of the Church.

From the earliest days of Christendom, worshipers not only celebrated their faith in words, but in images as well.   According to tradition, the Evangelist Luke was the first iconographer, writing down the Gospel not only in words but also in images. He wrote the first icon made by human hands, the Hodigitria (the Guide), an image of the Virgin Mary pointing the way to Jesus, portrayed sitting on her lap.

But while Luke was the first, he was certainly not the last.  The Church gradually developed a visual language to accompany it’s liturgical language and images were more than mere decorations — they were a vital part of early Christian worship.

But in the decades before the Seventh Ecumenical Council, things began to change.  The men at the helm of the Church and the state were increasingly hostile to icons. Known as the iconoclasts (literally, “image smashers”), they began to systematically destroy the images of Christ and the saints in churches, and persecuted those who made the images.

After several years of suffering under iconoclast persecution, the iconodules (literally, “venerators of  icons”) again rose to prominence in the Church and the state.  The Seventh Ecumenical Council was called to consider and respond to the charges of the iconoclasts.  Eventually the veneration of icons was affirmed, and to this day Orthodox Christians commemorate this council on the first Sunday of the Great Lent by carrying pictures of Jesus, Mary and the various saints in joyful procession during the liturgy of this special day.

You heard me right.

The Trinity has been established. A Christology that acknowledges Jesus as fully human, fully divine has been beautifully articulated. But Orthodoxy is at danger as long as there is a question about the pictures we use during worship. At first blush iconography hardly seems as important as the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

And that’s why it is important to look beyond the first blush…

Avoiding Misunderstanding

Before we go any farther, we should probably acknowledge that among most Protestants the very phrase “the veneration of icons” sounds a little too close to “the worship of idols” for comfort; the idea of someone bowing in front of a picture of St Theophanes the Marked and then kissing it seems a bit of a stretch. I remember being taught at church camp that Roman Catholics were idolaters because they “worshipped pictures of the saints.”  Admittedly, my “teachers” probably had no idea there was such a thing as Eastern Orthodoxy or we would have anathematized them too.

Now, in defense of those good meaning camp folk, the distinction between worship and veneration is a hard one to recognize, especially when you’re speaking something other than Greek.  In fact, the difficulty of translating the difference between dulia (veneration) and latria (worship) into Latin proved difficult when the canons of the Council were sent west from Nicea and read by Charlemagne and his francophone religious advisors.  It’s no easier now.

However, to venerate means to show respect and honor.  The Orthodox are careful to clarify that when an icon is veneration, the honor and respect is paid not to the icon, which is only a symbol, but rather to the prototype – the person or persons described in the icon.  What is more, paying respect to a person in whom we can see the changes God’s grace has wrought is profoundly different than pledging our obedience and our very lives to the God whom we worship. We worship Jesus Christ. We respect the great cloud of witnesses that have gone before us.

Why Does Any Of This Matter?

The Incarnation at Stake

The Orthodox recognize that it wasn’t just the first six councils that were called to wrestle with Christological heresies.  At the heart of the iconoclast controversy was a question of the Incarnation.  As the kontakion for the Triumph of Orthodoxy states, were it not for the Incarnation, writing an icon of the Son of God would be impossible;  God, in his divinity is indescribable, and hence the command admonishes us to make no graven images.

But God, who in his divinity is indescribable, in Christ Jesus consents to be described; he takes on flesh and becomes for us the image of the invisible God.  The Triumph of Orthodoxy is, in part, one final definitive declaration that In Christ, God has come near.  The Word has become flesh and made his dwelling among us.  It was not an illusion perpetrated by a God in disguise nor the mere delusion of Jesus’ followers. In the words of the Council, the icon helps “prove the true and non-imaginary Incarnation of God (quoted in Leonid Ouspensky’s Theology of the Icon vol 1, p 138).”

As Ouspensky writes:

This is the humiliation, the kenosis of God; He who is absolutely inaccessible to man, who is indescribable and unrepresentable, becomes describable and representable by assuming human flesh.  The icon of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, is an expression of the dogma of Chalcedon in image (vol 1 p 152).

Duality Rejected

Unlike Muslim iconoclasm which rejects all images as inappropriate, the iconoclasts’ objections were not grounded in a distrust of imagery itself. In fact, Christian iconoclasts did not just destroy liturgical images, they replaced them with other images, decorating their churches with picture of animals, nature, even everyday people.

So we see that it wasn’t the images the iconoclasts objected to, it was the idea that any images could portray the holiness of Christ or the sanctifying work of God in the lives of His saints. Icons are made of physical matter, and they represent the corporeal physicality of the subjects they portray (or at least so argued the iconoclasts.)  All this focus on the material, they said, trapped icons in a realm far below the spiritual which is by their definition wholly immaterial.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy, however, is a triumph over the idea that the material world is irredeemable.  Every time we read an icon and contemplate the holiness depicted therein we are reminded that Jesus Christ came to reconcile all things, things in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, to God.  Jesus did not merely take on human flesh, clothing himself in a body like ours; he redeemed human flesh, sanctifying it to himself.

A Call to Sanctification

The Gospel in the icon does not merely testify to Christ’s sanctification of human flesh in himself; it clearly affirms the will of God regarding our sanctification.  Just as by grace God takes the wood, wax and paint of the icon and makes it something holy, set apart for His purpose in the World, so too he sanctifies us.  In Jesus Christ the human nature was not subjugated and ultimately destroyed.  Instead, as the kontakion on the Triumph of Orthodox affirms Jesus Christ restored the fallen image of humanity to it’s created holiness by uniting it with divine beauty.

We likewise are called to be united with God. This sanctification does not happen by suppressing our physical world or denying our material reality. No, the icon reminds us it is not our material body that is the problem. Rather it happens as God transforms and purifies the soul that is wholly surrendered to him.

What is more, by representing the true saints of God in a language that does not merely seek to reproduce their material likeness in vivid realism, but rather points to the holiness the God’s grace has worked in them, icons not only remind us of God’s call to be holy, they also demonstrate that this calling can, by God’s grace, be realized in the life of the believer.

This is the Gospel, that we might become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

This is a Gospel we proclaim in Word and in images.

Or do we?  More on the practical implications of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, especially for Protestants, tomorrow.