For the Orthodox Christian a
portable icon is not an autonomous work of art, but rather a basic and
inseparable element of divine worship and liturgical life. It also expresses
essential principles of church dogma, based on the theology of the icon, the
principal exponent of which in the age of Iconoclasm was St. John of Damascus
(ca. 676–745). The iconoclastic controversy, it should be remembered, convulsed
the Church and disrupted the Byzantine Empire,
and while this movement prevailed it was forbidden to decorate churches with
figurative subject and to make or venerate portable icons.
The iconoclastic controversy was
settled when the 7th Ecumenical Council formulated the doctrine concerning
icons (787), and with the triumph of orthodoxy over iconoclasm, marked by the
institution of the Feast of Orthodoxy to commemorate the return of sacred
images to the churches (843), the icon assumed a prominent place in the
liturgical life of the Church and in private devotions. Basing itself on the
doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, the 7th Ecumenical Council adopted the
fundamental position that the icon is a testimony to that incarnation and
proclaimed that “we make icons, but we do not deify them, knowing that they are
only images and nothing else, for they have the name only of the original and
not the essence”. The Council described the “honor and veneration” to be
accorded to icons – which “passes to the prototype” (St. Basil the Great) – as
a “sanctioned and godly custom and tradition of the Church, a devout demand and
need of its flock”. The veneration of icons has been an essential
characteristic of the Orthodox Church ever since, for, as Tarasius, Patriarch
of Constantinople (789–806), noted: “It is acceptable and well-pleasing before
God to venerate and salute pictorial representations of the divine providence
of our Lord Jesus Christ and the immaculate Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary,
the holy angles and all the saints…”.
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