Transcript

Welcome to The Way of the Fathers.

I'm Jim Papandrea.

This podcast is a production of Catholic Culture.

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Today we continue our series on the heresies with episode 17, Iconoclasm.

Now you may already be familiar with the controversy over icons in the church's history.

It comes up in the 8th and 9th centuries, so really at the very end of the early church period, or you might even say the beginning of the Middle Ages.

And it comes up again during the Protestant Reformation.

But to really understand it, we have to go all the way back, back to the earliest decades of the church.

And there we will see that the concept of an icon is intimately tied up with the concept of relics and early Christian art.

Christianity has always been an incarnational religion.

Of course, the central aspect of our faith is that God himself has come to us in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, in the incarnation.

And the word incarnation is just a fancy word for the embodiment of the divine.

And this means that God is not afraid to get his hands dirty, so to speak.

Contrary to what the Docetics and Gnostics taught, God uses material things to intervene into the physical realm.

And the ultimate goal of the human person is not freedom from the physical, but the resurrection of the physical and the redemption of the material world.

We don't look forward to escaping our bodies, but to their purification.

So all of this means that physical things can be holy.

And holy things can sanctify a place and be a channel of grace to believers.

And this includes the sanctified bodies or mortal remains of the saints, which makes the place where they rest and await the resurrection holy ground.

And not only bodily remains, but also contact relics can be holy.

And we see this already in the New Testament, in Acts chapter 19, when a handkerchief that Paul touched heals people.

And from the very beginning of our faith, Christians would visit the tombs of the martyrs and other saints because this is holy ground.

To be closer to the physical remains of a saint is to be closer to the saint.

And to be closer to the saint who is with God in paradise in spirit is to be closer to God.

And the early Christians took their handkerchiefs with them and brought them to the tombs to touch them to the tombs and the relics.

And at the tombs, and especially in the catacombs, the early Christians decorated the walls with art.

Some of it was meant to comfort people mourning the loss of a loved one, or to encourage people going through times of persecution.

But it was also meant to encourage hope in the resurrection and in eternal life.

And so the early Christians went to the tombs regularly, not just for funerals, but for something called the refrigerium.

This is the memorial meal, a kind of picnic really, on the anniversary of the death of a loved one or a saint.

And this is the beginning of the celebration of the Feasts of the Saints.

In the earliest martyr account that we have, the Martyrdom of Polycarp from the mid-2nd century, after the bishop Polycarp was martyred, the Christians of Smyrna gathered up the bones of their bishop and put them in a special place where they could visit them and celebrate the anniversary of his victory over death and birth into eternal life.

Before long, the celebration of Mass at the tomb of a saint led to the expectation that to consecrate any altar, it had to be over the relics of a saint.

Just as the book of Revelation says, the martyrs await the resurrection under the altar, and even contact relics were considered holy.

In the Diary of Perpetua that tells the story of her arrest and execution, we see that a ring that touched the blood of a martyr was kept and honored by the Christian community.

Well, eventually, the same kind of reverence with which relics were treated also came to be invested in the artistic representations of Jesus and the saints.

And we call these honored artistic representations icons, because the word icon comes from the Greek word for image.

So what is an icon?

Well, icons are not the so-called poor man's Bible.

You can't learn anything just from looking at an icon.

Icons are not cartoons that tell a story, but they are reminders of what you already know.

You already have to know the story and the theology behind it.

But the icon reminds you of all that and encourages you in it.

Now, in reality, an icon can be a wide range of things, including symbols, scenes, or portraits.

If you wear a cross around your neck, that's an icon.

If you have a fish on the bumper of your car, that's an icon.

If you put a nativity scene on the mantle of your home at Christmastime, that's an icon.

But whatever form they take, an icon is a window into the spiritual realm.

It's an image that brings to mind a spiritual truth or reality.

But didn't God forbid images in the Ten Commandments?

Well, there are two kinds of images, those that are idols and those that are not.

And what makes the difference between the two is whether you worship it.

What God prohibited in the commandment was the worship of images, not all use of images.

And we know this because right there in the Old Testament, God actually commanded his people to make some icons.

We see the icons of the golden cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant in Exodus 25. We see statues of cherubim for the temple in 1 Kings 6. And we see the famous bronze serpent in Numbers chapter 21. So icons are simply those images that are not worshipped.

That is, they are not treated as an end in themselves, but as a means to an end.

And our church father, Tertullian, is a great example of how the church fathers understood this difference and saw the bronze serpent as not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

And so Tertullian says that, first, the bronze serpent is a type or a foreshadowing of the cross.

As he says, it is the sign of salvation, and whoever turns toward it is saved.

But notice, then, he quickly makes it clear.

The power of healing is not in the icon itself, but the power is God's. And so he says, it is the sign of salvation, and whoever turns toward it is saved, not by the sign, but by what it represents.

Now, Tertullian himself probably has in mind a passage from the Old Testament Book of Wisdom.

The Book of Wisdom clarifies that the healing power is not in the icon itself.

The Book of Wisdom says, for the one who turned toward it was saved, not by what was seen, but by you, the Savior of all.

That's Wisdom chapter 16, addressed, of course, directly to God.

So everyone understood that the power is not in the icon, but the power belongs to God.

And so St. Augustine wrote that if you honor or show reverence toward an icon, you are really honoring and reverencing not the icon itself, but the person or reality to which it points.

So for those icons that are representations of Jesus Christ or of doctrines of God, well then an icon is a sign which directs the human heart to that which it signifies.

For those other icons that are representations of saints, well then the icon directs us to imitate the saint by focusing on God as they did.

So then what's the problem?

Well, in the 8th century, the emperor of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire was a guy named Leo the Syrian.

And he decided to make a law prohibiting Christian icons.

Many people think that he was influenced by contact with Islam, that the Muslims who kept threatening his borders were accusing the Eastern Christians of idolatry because of their love for Christian art.

And so out of embarrassment that the Christians were being accused of ignoring the commandment against idolatry, the emperor outlawed icons.

And there may be some truth to that, though the primary reason was this.

The monasteries in the East were taking in tax-free money from the pilgrimages people were making in part to see the icons in the monasteries.

And, at this time, there was a very famous icon of Christ at the gate of the palace in Constantinople.

And in 726 A.D., the emperor had that icon destroyed, and the people of Constantinople responded by rioting.

Well, then Leo doubled down, and he sent his soldiers out to destroy all the icons, in fact, all the Christian art.

And when the bishop of Constantinople objected, the emperor gave him the boot and replaced him.

Now, it is sometimes said that some of the church fathers were against the use of icons.

But the truth is that all of the passages from the church fathers that are quoted as if they say this are taken out of context.

And they're all really about idolatry, not about the traditional use of icons.

There were a couple of minor local synods that tried to rein in superstition or abuse of icons.

There was a synod in Elvira in Spain in about the year 305 A.D., and that synod actually said that churches should not have pictures in them, but that was never really enforced, especially not outside of Spain.

There was also a synod called the Council in Trullo in 692, and that council made a rule prohibiting images of the Lamb of God as a symbol for Jesus.

But the Pope rejected this, and he went out of his way to include images of the Lamb of God in the mosaics in Rome.

The point is that while there may have been a few people who worried about abuses, in reality, the iconoclasts, those who were against icons, they were for the most part politicians, and even then, mostly in the East.

They were not bishops or theologians, and their motivations were political.

They were motivated by greed.

So when Leo the Syrian outlawed icons, the Pope at the time was Gregory III. Pope Gregory openly criticized the Emperor.

And so then it became a fight between the Pope in Rome, saying icons are holy images, and the Emperor in Constantinople, saying icons are idols.

The Emperor responded to the rebuke by invading Sicily, and the Pope excommunicated him and all of Constantinople with him.

Now, at this time, southern Italy had a lot of Greek immigrants.

In fact, if you've ever wondered why my last name sounds Greek even though it's Italian, this is why.

But what's a Greek Italian to do?

Obey the emperor or the pope?

In fact, the whole controversy led to more migration from Greece to southern Italy and even into Rome, to the point where a part of Rome near the river came to be known as the Latin equivalent of Greektown.

If you've ever been to Rome, this is the area around the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.

Well, one of our latest of the early church fathers was John of Damascus, and he wrote the definitive document that outlined the church's doctrine of icons.

It's called Apologetic Against Those Who Oppose Holy Images, or something like that, depending on the English translation.

The most important point he makes in that document is this.

To deny the validity and the value of icons is to deny that God's grace can come through the physical and that God can work through material things.

And to deny that is to deny the sacrament of the Eucharist and the incarnation itself.

Eventually, another emperor came into power.

His name was Constantine VI, but he was just a kid, and so his mother ran things.

She was the Empress Irene, and she got permission from the Pope, who was now Pope Adrian I, to convene the Seventh Ecumenical Council, also known as the Second Council of Nicaea, in the year 787 AD. And as always, for all the details on the council itself, as well as the events leading up to it, make sure to listen to Mike Aquilina's episode on that council.

Well, at that council, the bishops clarified the difference between an icon and an idol, and it has everything to do with how one uses it.

But this required clarifying the definition of certain Greek words.

Just as it had happened back in the 5th century, a big part of the development or the clarification of doctrine entails the sorting out of the proper technical terms.

But it's important to notice here that none of this was an issue until the 8th century.

Before that, there was no question about it.

And that's why they hadn't clarified the Greek terms until this time.

And for our purposes, we won't worry about the specific Greek words here.

I'll use the English equivalents.

The council clarified that to worship or adore an image would be idolatry.

So to worship an image makes it into an idol.

But we may venerate or reverence an image, and that means it's an icon.

Remember, to venerate or reverence an icon is not to make of it an end in itself, but rather to use it as a means to an end, the end goal being the worship of God, the Trinity.

We do not worship icons, relics, symbols, or saints, but we do venerate or reverence them as a way to worship God through them.

Also keep in mind that to worship God is not just about bowing or kneeling or even liturgy.

To worship God is to serve God, to submit to God, and to try our best to do God's will, and to make God in Christ the object of our faith and the center of our sacraments and our creeds.

And we do none of these things with icons.

Or if someone does, then they would cross the line into idolatry.

We only use icons to focus our devotion to God in Christ, often through the portraits of the saints as examples in the faith, precisely because of their focus on and their devotion to God in Christ.

Now, if you know the story of the bronze serpent in the Old Testament, you may remember what happened when the people started focusing on the bronze serpent itself rather than on God.

They started thinking that the power to heal was in the icon, and they started making it an end in itself.

In other words, they made of it an idol, and that's when it had to be destroyed.

But what made the difference between it being an icon and an idol was how the people treated it, how they used it.

And when it became an end in itself, and the people failed to see through it to God, when they put their faith and their trust in the image rather than in God, that's when it became an idol, and it had to go.

So, the Council of 787 AD had confirmed the Church's teaching on the subject of icons.

The council also confirmed that you need a relic to consecrate an altar, reaffirming that connection between the physical and holy ground.

But the controversy continued in the East into the 9th century until another empress, Theodora, the wife of the emperor Theophilus I, stepped in, and that was in about 843 AD, and after that, the controversy subsided.

But to this day, Eastern Christians tend to shy away from three-dimensional statues and prefer two-dimensional icons just to be on the safe side.

Now, I'm not an expert on the making of icons, so I won't be getting into that, but there is a whole beautiful theology of colors and symbolism and the way of making an icon that's worth looking into if you're interested in that.

The point is that the veneration of icons is not a one-way street only.

We use them as windows into the divine realm, but they also communicate to us God's grace.

They are sacramentals in the sense that they can be a means of grace for us and help facilitate our sanctification.

So in the big picture, we have the very early reverence of relics in the church.

And over time, the reverence paid to relics from very early on transfers to icons because God works in the physical realm through material things.

But what you have to understand about the icon controversy is that it was a political move.

This was not a theological debate where there were bishops on both sides.

The iconoclast side was entirely made up of the emperors and their soldiers.

It was 100% an attempt to gain control of the monasteries.

The emperors wanted the land, wanted the monasteries themselves, which were taken away from the monks and repurposed.

And they wanted the money that was coming in from pilgrimages.

It would never have been a controversy if not for these political reasons.

The reverence of icons was a long established tradition.

The iconoclast position, and by the way, iconoclast means the icon smashers, that position was what was new.

And the proof of this is that the people in both southern Italy and in Constantinople itself rioted over their loss of this treasured devotional practice.

And of course, the fact that the popes opposed the eastern emperors on this issue.

So what the council had to do was to come to a consensus on the right words to use to distinguish what we do with icons versus what is done with idols.

Precisely because it had not been an issue before that time, the church had not clarified the language, but at the council it did, and clarified the difference between veneration and worship.

And here's a quote from the anathemas from the Council of 787 against those who confuse the two.

It says, So in other words, if you take the prohibitions against idol worship and say that applies to icons, well then, an ecumenical council has declared you a heretic.

The bottom line is, we venerate or reverence icons.

We do not worship icons.

This language was clarified, but the distinction was not new.

And so the anathemas continue.

Anathema to those who do not show respect for holy icons.

Anathema to those who call holy icons idols.

Anathema to those who say that the veneration of icons is a form of idolatry.

So, are there modern iconoclasts?

Well, during the Protestant Reformation, some branches of the Protestants did exactly what Leo the Syrian had done.

They destroyed all the Christian art they could.

They believed that churches should be plain, with no decoration.

And so, apparently out of a fear that people might lapse into idolatry, or perhaps even just idolatry on the principle that they believed all images are automatically idols, thinking there's no such thing as a holy image or holy icon.

They whitewashed over paintings, they destroyed other forms of Christian art like statues, and they even destroyed stained glass windows.

Why were some of the Protestants so worried about icons?

Because, in a way, the Protestant Reformation had changed the very definition of the concept of conversion.

Conversion to Christianity had always meant a radical change in lifestyle.

But in trying to get Catholics to join their Reform movements, the Reformers often reduced conversion to an intellectual decision.

After all, they were asking Christians to become just another kind of Christian.

And when you add in things like the doctrine of sola fide, faith alone, interpreted as belief alone, well, the Christian life became, for some of these Protestants, something more intellectual than embodied.

And many of the Protestants also got rid of other ways to bring the body and the senses into worship, like kneeling or making the sign of the cross or incense.

And in their aversion to anything sensory, the faith became disembodied.

In a way, it became Gnostic.

But that was never the way Christianity was meant to be.

The Incarnation itself proves that God mediates grace through the material and physical.

But avoiding the physical is to fall into one of the errors of the Gnostics.

The Church, however, has always known and taught that God does mediate grace through material things.

And so, at the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Second Nicaea in the year 787, the Council Fathers specifically said that they were keeping with the tradition and they said that the purpose of representative art is to emphasize the Incarnation against Docetism and Gnosticism.

And so the church has its holy objects, which of course includes icons.

Iconoclasm is a heresy because it denies the way that God works within creation through created things.

At the end of the day, it's Gnostic, and it calls into question the resurrection and the incarnation itself, because, as Scripture tells us, Jesus himself is an icon of the Father.

Next time on The Way of the Fathers, the conclusion to our series on the heresies.

Thanks for listening.

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