Image and Prototype: The Honor That Passes to the One Depicted

The grammar of the whole Orthodox defense of icons: St. Basil’s principle that “the honor given to the image passes to the prototype,” and the distinction — sharpened by John of Damascus and dogmatized at Nicaea II — between the relative veneration (proskynesis / timetike proskynesis) given to icons and the absolute worship (latreia) owed to God alone. This file lays out these two coupled distinctions, the vocabulary problem they created for the West, and why they answer the charge of idolatry.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Basil’s Principle and Its Career

The single most-cited sentence in the iconophile literature is not about icons at all. In On the Holy Spirit, arguing that the honor paid to the Son is not divided from the honor of the Father, St. Basil the Great appeals to a familiar civic fact: “the honor given to the image passes to the prototype” (he tes eikonos time epi to prototypon diabainei) (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45; trans. NPNF II/8). Basil’s example was the portrait of the emperor: to honor the imperial image was to honor the emperor, and there were not two emperors because there were many images, for “he who reveres the image reveres in it the one portrayed.” Basil deployed this to defend the unity of worship of Father and Son, but the iconophiles saw at once that the same logic governs the sacred image: veneration offered to the icon is not detained by the wood and paint but travels along the relation of likeness to the person portrayed (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.21; III.16, quoting Basil; trans. Louth, SVS Press, 2003; Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei, Princeton, 1990, ch. 6).

This principle does two things at once. It explains how an icon can be venerated without the object itself becoming the terminus of honor — the honor is transitive, passing through the image — and it explains why the veneration of an icon is not multiplied idolatry: however many icons of Christ there may be, the honor they receive converges on the one Christ, just as the honor of many imperial portraits converged on one emperor (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.21). The Horos of the Seventh Ecumenical Council would take up Basil’s sentence almost verbatim: “the honor which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the subject represented” (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; trans. in Richard Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Liverpool, 2018; see The Seventh Ecumenical Council).

Proskynesis and Latreia: The Two Honors

The second and coupled distinction is between two kinds of honor. Greek theological usage distinguished:

  • Latreia — the absolute worship, adoration, and service owed to God alone, to the Holy Trinity, on account of the divine nature. To offer latreia to any creature is idolatry.
  • Proskynesis — literally “bowing down,” an act of reverence and honor that Scripture and custom render to many objects and persons short of God: to kings, to elders, to holy places, to the Ark, to one another. This relative honor, when directed to a holy image, is timetike proskynesis, “honorable reverence,” and it is not the worship of latreia (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.27–40; Nicaea II, Horos).

The iconoclasts collapsed these two, treating any bowing before an image as latreia and therefore as idolatry. The iconophile answer was that the categories are distinct in Scripture itself: Abraham “bowed himself” (prosekynesen) to the sons of Heth (Genesis 23:7) without worshipping them as gods; Jacob “bowed” toward the top of Joseph’s staff (Genesis 47:31, LXX; cf. Hebrews 11:21); the people “bowed down” before the Ark and the Temple (Psalm 98[99]:5, “worship at his footstool”; Psalm 5:7) without idolatry — for the honor passed to the God whose footstool and dwelling these were (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.33–36, marshalling the biblical instances of licit proskynesis). John devotes the fullest of his three treatises largely to classifying the kinds of veneration precisely to show that proskynesis is a broad genus, of which only one species — the worship of God — is latreia, and that icon-veneration falls squarely among the licit relative honors (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.27–40; Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, Brill, 1996, ch. 8, on John’s analysis of proskynesis).

The Council of Nicaea II fixed the distinction dogmatically, defining that to the holy icons “should be given due salutation and honorable reverence (aspasmon kai timetiken proskynesin), not indeed that true worship of faith (latreian) which pertains alone to the divine nature” (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; trans. Price). The distinction is thus not a theologian’s nicety but conciliar dogma: the Church venerates icons; it worships God.

The Vocabulary Problem and the Western Misreading

This precise distinction was carried imperfectly into Latin, with consequences. When the Acts of Nicaea II reached the Frankish court of Charlemagne in a poor Latin translation, the Greek proskynesis had been rendered by adoratio — a word that in Latin usage meant precisely the worship reserved to God. The Franks accordingly read the Council as commanding the adoration of images and rejected it in the Libri Carolini (the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum, c. 790–793), the theologians around Charlemagne charging the Greeks with idolatry on the strength of a mistranslation (Ann Freeman, ed., Opus Caroli regis contra synodum [Libri Carolini], MGH, 1998; Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, on the translation error and the Frankish response). [Corrected: the Libri Carolini’s charge that Nicaea II commanded the “adoration” (adoratio = latreia) of icons rests on a defective Latin rendering of the Greek, which had said proskynesis (relative veneration), explicitly denying latreia to images; the Council taught the opposite of what the Franks understood it to teach (Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 2009).] The episode is the classic illustration of why the proskynesis/latreia distinction, obvious in Greek, was a persistent source of East–West misunderstanding; the same fault line runs through the later divergence of Eastern icon and Western image (see The Divergence from Western Religious Art).

The Kinds of Image

To complete the grammar, John of Damascus also distinguished the kinds of image, so that “image” would not be equivocated. In the third treatise he lists several: the natural image (the Son as the natural, consubstantial Image of the Father), the image in God’s foreknowledge (the divine ideas of things to be made), man made “according to the image” of God, the image in Scripture that represents invisible things in bodily form (the cherubim, symbolic visions), the image that prefigures things to come (the bronze serpent, the Ark as types), and finally the image made “for the remembrance of past events” — the historical, commemorative image, which is the painted icon (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.16–23; Andrew Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford, 2002, ch. 9). This taxonomy guards against two errors at once: it prevents the icon from being confused with the natural Image (the Son is God’s image by nature; the icon is an image by imitation and relation), and it prevents the prohibition of idols from being extended to every image, since Scripture itself is full of God-given images of the other kinds.

Together these distinctions form the settled logic of the Orthodox icon. Image is not identity: the icon is like its prototype, not one in essence with it. Honor is transitive: veneration of the image passes to the prototype. And honor is graded: the relative reverence (proskynesis) of icons is categorically distinct from the worship (latreia) of God. Grant these three, and the charge of idolatry dissolves; deny them, and the whole practice collapses into the very thing the iconoclasts accused it of being. The subsequent history is the story of the Church defining, against imperial power, exactly this grammar (see The Theology of the Image).

See Also

References

  • Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.45. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8. (“The honor given to the image passes to the prototype”; the imperial-portrait analogy.)
  • John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 2003. (I.21; III.16–40: the kinds of image and of veneration; the biblical instances of licit proskynesis.)
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The taxonomy of images in the third treatise.)
  • The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Trans. Richard Price. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (The Horos and its timetike proskynesis / latreia distinction.)
  • Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1996. (John’s analysis of proskynesis; the theology of image and prototype.)
  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. (Basil’s principle in the iconophile case.)
  • Noble, Thomas F. X. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. (The Libri Carolini, the mistranslation of proskynesis as adoratio, and the Frankish response.)
  • Freeman, Ann, ed. Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini). MGH, Concilia 2, Supplement 1. Hannover, 1998.
  • Scripture: Genesis 23:7; 47:31 (LXX); Psalms 5:7; 98[99]:5; Hebrews 11:21.