The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Theme

Holy icons

The image, the incarnation, and the difference between veneration and worship.

  • Dogmatic definitionDefined by an ecumenical council or otherwise confessed by the Church as binding doctrine. Not every sentence a council wrote is a definition: its acts, letters and disciplinary canons are different things.
  • Liturgical witnessAttested in the Church's worship — in a hymn, a prayer, a rite or a commemoration. Liturgical language is theological rather than casual, but a hymn is not a canon.

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The Seventh Ecumenical Council restored the veneration of images and stated the distinction on which everything turns: the honour given to an image passes to the one depicted, and the worship due to God alone is given to God alone.

The argument is Christological. Because God has genuinely become man and been seen, he can be depicted as man. An icon depicts the person, not the divine nature, which no image attempts to represent.

Iconoclasm returned after 787 and was finally ended in 843; the Orthodox Church commemorates that on the first Sunday of Great Lent as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

Follow this theme through the archive

  • The Second Council of Nicaea

    The council that restored the veneration of holy images and distinguished the honour given to an icon from the worship due to God alone. It also issued twenty-two disciplinary canons.

    Council

  • John of Damascus

    The last of the Greek Fathers commonly so counted: a monk under Muslim rule who wrote the classic defence of holy images and the first systematic summary of Orthodox doctrine.

    Father or writer

  • Holy icons and the Seventh Council

    The image, the incarnation, and a controversy that lasted more than a century.

    Lesson

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.