One of the popular myths of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman branches of the Church is that their present theology is in substance unchanged from the early Church and exists in continuity from then to today as the Consensus of the Fathers, or the Consensus Patrum. This rhetoric of unbroken continuity is attractive, but ultimately flawed and misleading, as the present study will show. Despite the many virtues of the Roman Church of the West and the Orthodox Church of the East, what we will call the Byzantine or Imperial Church, it must be admitted on all sides that the truth must prevail regarding the central claims through which they assert the superiority and exclusivity of their positions.
The position which will be examined here is the Byzantine Church’s stance towards icons. As will be shown, history is clear that the early Church was for centuries aniconic, and only adopted the religious use of icons after the imperialization of the Church, which is to say after the creation of the Byzantine State Church. In studying this topic, however, a key distinction must be made, and that is the difference between iconoclasm and aniconism. Iconoclasm refers to the removal and destruction of religious imagery, which is to say a total rejection of it. Aniconism is that which distinguishes between religiously themed visual art, on the one hand, which it accepts as legitimate, and the religious use of such art for the purposes of symbolic, semiotic, or representative veneration, on the other hand, which it rejects. Too many discussions of this topic get bogged down by failing to keep clear this distinction, and although there are variations within these two positions, this simple distinction is sufficient to establish our argument.
As such, early architecture that has religiously themed art on its walls does not serve as evidence for iconodulia, iconodulia being the religious veneration of representative images. Specifically Byzantine iconodulia is the necessity of venerating such images. Nor would the veneration, say, of the text of the Gospels serve to positively assert the case for iconodulia. Moreover, neither the making of the sign of the Cross, nor the veneration of the bare sign of the Cross (for it is a sign-symbol, not an image-symbol), serve as positive support for the Byzantine theory of iconodulia. None of these fall necessarily within the clear prohibition against bowing to images as defined by the 2nd Commandment, and so cannot be cited as support for Byzantine iconodulia. Lastly, the special command of God to, say, erect statues of cherubim or set up a bronze serpent, did not include any permission to religiously venerate them, so likewise cannot be evidence for Byzantine iconodulia. In this we ought also to observe that there is no meaningful distinction between the terms idol and icon, for as will be shown below these are functionally interchangeable terms meaning, respectively, form and image, both equally having the semiotic theory of representation ascribed to their religious use.
Another point which is worth attending to here at the beginning is that we will not be addressing the argument for or against icons from a philosophical-theological perspective. The logic of the argument for icons is thus not relevant to this study. The reason for this is clear enough, that the argument at hand is the historical claim by the Byzantine Church, that their position represents that of the Consensus Patrum in unbroken continuity from the early Church. As such, the argument here will be principally historiographic in nature, touching on theology only insofar as it bears witness to historical development.
In beginning to look at the earliest Christian statements regarding images, as Moshe Barasch demonstrates in his work, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea, “what these early Christian apologists have to say about the images of the gods is so similar, actually unified” (Barusch, New York University Press, 1995, p. 98). According to his research, “Not a single one of these Christian documents composed between a.d. 140 and 180 suggests a deviance from the basic attitude of rejection” (ibid, p. 99). In fact, he found, “the rejection of divine images is complete” (ibid). The authors he examined from this period included Aristedes of Athens, Justin Martyr, Tatian, the Epistle to Diognetus, and Athenagoras of Athens. What he observed in his discussion of Aristedes sums up well the general early Christian attitude: “Worshipping images is a central criterion for distinguishing between pagans and Christians” (ibid, p. 97). His conclusion leaves no ambiguity, that, “in reading the texts of the apologists we do not find a single statement that, however interpreted, would oblige us to qualify the conclusion that the Christians of the time rejected sacred images. … the Christian apologists altogether condemned such images” (p. 100).
As is well known, Tertullian and Origen in the 3rd Century continued this consensus regarding the paradigmatic Christian rejection of iconodulia. But what might be less known is that Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus actually selected out and published Origen’s (a fortiori) rejection of Byzantine iconodulia, arguing that much less than God’s Commandments forbidding, even “common sense, nevertheless, forbids us to think that God is by any means corruptible matter, or that He is honoured when He is fashioned by men in forms of dead matter, supposed to pictorially or symbolically represent Him” (Basil and Gregory, The Philocalia of Origen, Chapter 19).
In this way it is shown that these two great Cappadocian Fathers maintained the Christian rejection of images, and with clear awareness of the theory of representative veneration. Of course, it should not need to be mentioned that the proof-texting Basil’s argument for the ontological representation of Christ to the Father, in his classic defense of the full deity of the Holy Spirit, was not an implicit endorsement of material semiotic iconodulia (Barusch, pp. 226-27).
A little earlier in the 4th Century, Athanasius also maintained the consistent rejection of material representation. He even specifically mocked the theory of representative veneration when he wrote in Against the Heathen that, in olden times:
“Graven images were worshipped by the commands of kings. Whom men could not honour in presence because they dwelt afar off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from afar, and made an express image of the king whom they honoured, to the end that by this their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent as if he were present.” (Athanasius, Against the Heathen, Part 1, ch. 11)
Clearly, the foregoing was the consistent Patristic consensus among Christians, and as Paul Alexander summarized: “No Church Father prior to the fourth century approved of Christian religious art” (The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1958, p. 215). According to Alexander, it was not until the first half of the 6th Century, perhaps with the work of Iohannes of Thessalonica and Leontius of Neapolis about a century prior to John of Damascus (d. 749), that there was a clear turn toward semiotic iconodulia (Alexander, pp. 33, 36). He found in the writings of Iohannes Philoponus, specifically his De opificio mundi (written some time between 529 and 543), that he “still considered the symbolic theory of images a pagan characteristic” (Alexander, p. 35), showing that Christians still published against what came to be the later Byzantine iconodulia.
But this raises the question: When did the symbolic theory of images originate? Alexander argued:
“To thoughtful pagans of all periods, and especially those of the Late Roman Empire, the cult statues were not gods, nor were the gods thought to inhabit them. They were merely set up to honour the gods, to remind mortal man of their existence and power, and to ensure that sacrifices and prayers presented to the statues would reach the gods themselves. This symbolical view of religious statues grew more complex as time went along until authors like Porphyry and Julian systematized the idea of divine representation.” (Alexander, p. 214)
In other words, the symbolic theory was ubiquitous in the pagan world, as the early Christian apologists were well aware, and so clearly among these Christians of the first three centuries the 2nd Commandment was not considered abrogated by the Incarnation, nor offset by the theory of representation, as borne witness by the Christian apologists above who clearly repudiated the symbolic theory which formed the substance of the later Byzantine position. It is important, then, to know the precursors to the Byzantine theory as espoused by John of Damascus.
As Alexander argued, the symbolic theory was known by Christian apologists as early as Aristedes, Justin Martyr, and Athenagorus in the 2nd Century (Alexander, p. 25), Origen also responding in the 3rd Century to Celsus’ symbolic theory, but among pagans it received perhaps its most sophisticated exposition. As Alexander states, “In Porphyry’s work the symbolic theory of religious images had reached its climax” (Alexander, p. 30). Porphyry (3rd Century) was an apologist opposed to Christianity (though much quoted by John of Damascus), but what is perhaps even more significant is that Julian the Apostate (emperor 361-363) picked up and expounded on this same theory of representative image worship in his infamous rejection of Christianity (Alexander, pp. 27-28). Of his pagan heritage he wrote:
“... our fathers established statues and altars, and the maintenance of undying fire, and generally speaking everything of the sort as symbols of the presence of the gods, not that we should regard such things as gods, but that we may worship the gods through them.” (Alexander, p. 28)
This pagan symbolical theory almost completely prefigures the later Byzantine theory as championed by John of Damascus. As Alexander argues:
“The development of the symbolic argument is clear. A direct tradition leads from the pagan theory of images to that of the Byzantine Christians.” (Alexander, p. 36)
“It is evident then at the beginning of the Iconoclast Controversy the Iconophiles were using in defence of their images all the arguments derived from the symbolic concept of the image which had been previously used by pagans in favour of their cult statues.” (Alexander, p. 39)
The theological metamorphosis in the Byzantine Church regarding icons is conclusive, and it shows decisively that the Byzantine Church cannot claim to possess the Consensus Patrum on the issue of its veneration of images, but a stark deviation from the unanimous first centuries of the Church regarding not icons merely, but specifically the symbolical theory of veneration.
It is astonishing that the Byzantine Church picked up the very kind of arguments used by those the Consensus Patrum opposed implacably for centuries, even those of the infamous Julian the Apostate, and imposing them with such vehemence as to pronounce, against all who would disagree or refuse to bow before and kiss man-made images of Christ, angels, and saints, an anathema, which they define as meaning "nothing less than complete separation from God" (2nd Nicaea, "The Letter from the Synod to the Emperor and Empress, from The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, Vol. 14, p. 573).
Contrary to Nicaea 2, but in perfect agreement with the early consensus of the Church, regarding the immediate veneration of angels and men, a fact which speaks clearly to whether their images ought to be religiously venerated, the New Testament, states:
And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship (προσκυνέω) before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things. Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship (προσκυνέω) God. (Revelation 22:8-9 KJV)
“And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and fell down at his feet, and worshipped (προσκυνέω) him. But Peter took him up, saying, Stand up; I myself also am a man.” (Acts 10:25-26 KJV)
In conclusion, it would be most consistent with the Scriptures and the historic consensus of the Post-Apostolic era together with the first centuries of the Christian Church to return to aniconism by no longer offering semiotic worship in relation to man-made images, not only to those of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, but also to those of angels and men.
-Rev. Joshua Schooping
