Hidden History of Early Christian Icons

16:43 The apostles didn't correct this practice. In fact, it appears they adopted it themselves as the apostle Paul makes reference to evangelizing with the crucifix. load-bearing

St. John Chrysostom (preacher) Chrysostom's own homily on this verse reads it the other way. He stresses that Christ was crucified in Jerusalem, not Galatia, and that Paul says "openly portrayed" rather than merely "crucified" to praise the Galatians' faith, which had grasped by hearing what eyewitnesses standing at the actual cross had failed to grasp by seeing — Paul's preaching was so vivid it was "as if" a picture, a rhetorical figure, not a report that Paul carried and displayed a crucifix. Reading Galatians 3:1 as evidence of a physical object asks the verse to do what its own most careful patristic commentator says it does not do.

John Chrysostom, Homily 3 on Galatians, on Gal. 3:1

17:31 Saint Justin Martyr preserves a mid second century reference to an icon of the crucified Jesus on a cross to a Jewish interlocutor load-bearing

St. Justin Popović (dogmatician) Chapters 90-91 of the Dialogue with Trypho, which this rests on, do not describe a painted or carved image Christians possessed. Justin is reading Moses' outstretched hands at the battle with Amalek, and Jacob's blessing of Joseph's "horns," as Old Testament types — foreshadowing signs — of the cross, exactly as he reads the bronze serpent and the paschal lamb elsewhere in the same work. That is typological exegesis of Scripture, not testimony to a physical icon of the crucifixion being carried or venerated by second-century Christians. The word "icon" here overstates what Justin actually says.

Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 90-91

17:31 Saint Justin Martyr preserves a mid second century reference to an icon of the crucified Jesus on a cross to a Jewish interlocutor load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) Chapters 90-91 of Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, which this rests on, describe no painted or carved image Christians possessed. Justin reads Moses' outstretched hands at the battle with Amalek, and Jacob's blessing of Joseph's "horns," as Old Testament types — foreshadowing signs — of the cross, exactly as he elsewhere reads the bronze serpent and the paschal lamb. That is typological exegesis of Scripture, not testimony to a physical icon of the crucifixion carried or venerated by second-century Christians; the word "icon" overstates what the text says. (Note: Justin Martyr himself has no seat on this bench; this answer stands on his own text, read as this tradition's iconographic Fathers read the pre-Nicene witnesses.)

Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 90-91

29:47 Saint Gregory of Nicaea described one icon in his homily in praise of the blessed Theodore, the great martyr

St. Gregory of Nyssa (ascent) There is no father of note called Gregory of Nicaea associated with this text. The homily In Praise of Blessed Theodore, the Great Martyr, with its description of the painted panel and the tears the sight of it draws, is by St. Gregory of Nyssa, brother of St. Basil, from the 380s. It is a genuinely valuable witness to fourth-century devotional art and deserves to be cited under its right author.

Gregory of Nyssa, In Praise of the Great Martyr Theodore (CPG 3183)

32:44 Epiphanius records that the majority of clergy defended icon veneration, explaining that instead of treating icons as idols, which receive sacrifices, we make images of the saints in their memory and we prostrate ourselves in front of them in their honor. load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) This turns Epiphanius exactly backward. Epiphanius of Salamis is the strongest fourth-century patristic voice against images — he is reported to have torn down a curtain painted with a figure of Christ or a saint in a Palestinian church, and his anti-image fragments were the chief patristic authority the iconoclast Synod of Hieria (754) assembled against Nicaea II. The line quoted here is Epiphanius stating the iconodule position in order to refute it as idolatry under another name, not his own report offered in its favor. Citing his rehearsal of an argument as if it were his endorsement of icon veneration misreads the source against its own plain sense. It is worth adding, for fairness to Epiphanius himself, that Orthodox scholarship (Fr. Steven Bigham's study, published by an Orthodox press) has argued the anti-image fragments transmitted through Nicephorus may themselves be corrupted or partly spurious — but even granting Bigham's doubt, nothing in the authentic corpus shows Epiphanius defending icon veneration as his own view.

Epiphanius, fragments preserved in Patriarch Nicephorus's Antirrhetikos/Refutatio et Eversio, as quoted at Hieria (754) and answered at Nicaea II (787); Steven Bigham, Epiphanius of Salamis, Doctor of Iconoclasm? Deconstruction of a Myth (Orthodox Research Institute)

10:21 Eight hundred years later, Leo of Chalcedon applied the same scrupulosity to the recycling and disposing of icons themselves and was condemned for the same idea.

St. John of Damascus (expositor) Leo of Chalcedon was condemned in 1094 not because he honored icons but because he held that consecrated matter remained inalienably holy in itself, so that Alexios I could not even melt down damaged plate to pay troops — a position the Synod of Blachernae judged excessive. The Church's actual doctrine, stated by Basil and applied by Nicaea II, is that veneration is relative and passes through the type to the prototype; it does not lodge power in the matter irrevocably, which is precisely the point on which Leo overreached. The parallel to Uzzah is fair as far as it goes, but the speaker should say what the Church's corrective principle actually was, since that principle is the whole of Orthodox iconology and not incidental to it.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45; Nicaea II, Horos (787); on Leo, the acts of the Council of Blachernae (1094) as discussed in J. Ryder's study of the affair

16:02 While some read the proceeding as Eusebius critiquing icons, the opposite is likely the case. In other books of his, Eusebius extols the existence of Christian art in Constantinople and at Mamre. load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) This omits the one Eusebian text the whole controversy actually turns on. In his Letter to Constantia, Eusebius refused outright to send the empress an image of Christ, arguing that Christ's transfigured glory "cannot be conceived nor represented by man" and comparing image-making of Christ to pagan idolatry — the very letter the iconoclast Synod of Hieria (754) put at the head of its patristic dossier, and which Nicaea II (787) had to answer point by point rather than pass over. An ambiguous notice about a statue at Paneas cannot outweigh this; the honest reckoning, which the iconodule Fathers themselves made, is that Eusebius is a genuine and troubling witness against images that the tradition had to argue past, not one it can quietly enlist.

Eusebius, Letter to Constantia, preserved in the acts of Nicaea II (787) and originally in the iconoclast florilegium of Hieria (754); Nicaea II's Horos answering the iconoclast dossier

28:23 Irenaeus, an orthodox source, relates a gnostic group that crowned icons, something he mentions neutrally, only to then criticize the same group for other modes of veneration, like those of the pagans, probably sacrificial. load-bearing

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (rule) Irenaeus's actual sentence does not divide neutral crowning from a separately criticized excess; it is one continuous indictment. He lists the Carpocratians' possession of images, their claim that Pilate made a likeness of Christ, their crowning of these images alongside busts of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, "and other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles" — all in a single breath, embedded between his report of their ear-branding and Marcellina's leading multitudes astray. Irenaeus's whole purpose in Against Heresies I.25 is to show the Carpocratians as a moral and doctrinal scandal; the crowning of images sits inside that indictment as one more count against them, not as an accepted Christian custom he happens to record in passing.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.25.6

11:14 Dionysus the Areopagite, a disciple of Paul mentioned in the scriptures, also attests to the practice of signing the cross, solidifying its apostolic pedigree. load-bearing

St. Dionysius the Areopagite (apophasis) The corpus that bears this name is received by the Church as a genuine treasure of her theology, but the man who wrote it is not the Dionysius of Acts 17:34. The vocabulary, the developed hierarchies, and the dependence on later Neoplatonism place the corpus around the year 500 — four centuries after Paul. The Church receives the writings for what they say, not for a claim about who said them; using them to certify a practice as literally apostolic, rather than as fifth or sixth century witness, is a fault this standpoint corrects in its own reading of the corpus.

The corpus itself, Divine Names / Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, on its own internal evidence of date; the standard patristic judgment that the author is pseudonymous, as noted wherever the corpus is cited in Orthodox theology today

21:01 Dionysite's observation about icons, reliable in as much as he personally knew several apostles, provides the theological rationale that they must have used to accept icon veneration load-bearing

St. Dionysius the Areopagite (apophasis) The same correction applies here as before: the Church does not hold that the author of the Divine Names sat under the apostles. What is genuinely apostolic in Orthodox iconology is not this text's authorship but its content, received because the whole Church has tested and kept it, not because a first-century pedigree can be certified for it. Building an argument for the apostles' own reasoning on a personal acquaintance the author never had asks the source to prove more than the Church herself claims for it.

The Dionysian corpus, Divine Names / Celestial Hierarchy, read on its own internal evidence of a fifth-to-sixth-century date

37:12 To this day, the Eastern, Oriental, and Assyrian Orthodox churches have largely maintained canonicity in their art forms.

Fr. John Meyendorff (conciliarist) Grouping these three together as one continuous witness passes over real and unhealed division. "Eastern Orthodox" and "Oriental Orthodox" have been separated since Chalcedon (451) over the very Christological question — one nature or two — that bears directly on what an icon can and cannot depict, and the so-called Assyrian Church of the East separated earlier still, at Ephesus (431), holding a Christology historically associated with markedly greater caution toward images than either Byzantine or Oriental practice. None of these bodies are Eastern Orthodox in the sense this board answers for, and "Orthodox" is not one label covering all three; it flattens a division that the Fathers this standpoint follows regarded as dogmatically serious, not merely artistic.

The Council of Chalcedon (451) and the Council of Ephesus (431), as the Orthodox Church receives their Christological definitions; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, on the fifth- and sixth-century Christological split with the non-Chalcedonians

38:53 They do not pray towards these depictions, kiss them or believe that they exude power as windows into heaven.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) This overstates the Roman Catholic case for the sake of the contrast. Rome's own Council of Trent (Session 25, 1563) and the Catechism it stands behind (CCC 2131-2132, which explicitly cites Basil's "honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype" and Nicaea II by name) teach that images are to be venerated, and Roman Catholic devotional practice — kissing icons and statues, pilgrimage to wonder-working images, ex-votos — plainly continues that teaching, even where the underlying metaphysics differs from the Palamite essence-and-energies account this standpoint would give for why an icon can be a channel of grace. Real difference exists between East and West on how veneration is theologically grounded; the claim that Western Christians simply do not do it is not accurate and is worth marking as such rather than granting.

Council of Trent, Session 25, Decree on the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images (1563); Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2131-2132

0:36 the ark received what was due to God as it was a type receiving veneration in place of the prototype load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) This is Orthodoxy's own teaching, stated correctly. St. Basil gave it the classic form that Nicaea II and John of Damascus both build on: "the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype" — the veneration terminates not in the wood or gold but in the one it represents. Damascus applies exactly this typological reading of the Ark and the cherubim in his First Apology to defend Christian icons from the charge of idolatry, so this claim stands on Orthodoxy's own ground and needs no correction.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45; John of Damascus, First Apology Against Those who Decry Holy Images, §§8-16

31:34 Purely symbolic depictions, such as Christ being depicted as a lamb, were eventually regulated out of existence by a conciliar canon, specifically because of the potential for Christological confusion.

St. John of Damascus (expositor) This is correct and Orthodoxy owns it without reservation. Canon 82 of the Council in Trullo (692), which the Orthodox Church receives, orders that Christ be shown thereafter in human form rather than under the type of the lamb, precisely so that his historical, incarnate humanity would not be obscured by a figure suited to the age of shadows before the Word became flesh. The council states the reasoning exactly as the speaker gives it.

Council in Trullo (692), Canon 82