The Icon as a Window to Heaven

In Orthodox theology an icon is not a decorative picture nor an object of worship but a means of communion — a “window” through which the one depicted becomes present to the one who prays, and through which honor is carried to its living prototype. This file sets out what an icon is: a sacred image that participates in the holiness of its subject by grace and relation, not by nature, and is therefore the antithesis of an idol rather than a form of one.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word and What It Names

The Greek eikon means simply “image” or “likeness”; it is the word Paul uses when he calls Christ “the image (eikon) of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), and the word Genesis uses when it says man was made “according to the image (kat’ eikona) of God” (Genesis 1:26–27, LXX). The theology of the holy icon is built on this same vocabulary: the painted icon is a likeness that makes its prototype present, standing in a long biblical logic of image and archetype that reaches its center in Christ, the perfect Image of the Father (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, trans. Gythiel, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 1, ch. 1). An icon, then, is not first of all an art object to be judged by aesthetic criteria but a theological reality — “theology in line and color,” in the phrase associated with the Russian religious philosophy of the icon (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, introduction).

The common Orthodox description of the icon as a “window to heaven” captures its function: it is not a wall to be looked at but an opening to be looked through, a point at which the invisible world touches the visible and the person portrayed — Christ, the Theotokos, a saint — is made present to the worshipper (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2, on the icon as a means of communion; Egon Sendler, The Icon: Image of the Invisible, Oakwood, 1988, on the icon’s transparency to its prototype). The icon does not aim to reproduce the natural appearance of a person as a portrait or a photograph would; it aims to manifest that person as he or she is in the transfigured life of the Kingdom, and so to draw the one who venerates it into that same reality.

Presence and Participation, Not Identity

The decisive claim — and the one most easily misunderstood — is that the icon makes present its prototype without being its prototype. The icon of Christ is not Christ; the icon of a saint is not the saint. Yet through the icon the faithful enter into a real relation with the one depicted, because the image participates in the holiness of its archetype by grace and by the relation of likeness, not by any change in the wood and paint themselves (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1). This is why an icon can be venerated: the veneration is not arrested at the material object but passes through it to the living person, exactly as St. Basil the Great had said of the imperial image — “the honor given to the image passes to the prototype” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45; trans. NPNF II/8), a text the iconophiles made central to their case (see Image and Prototype).

The relation of image to prototype is one of hypostatic likeness rather than shared essence. St. Theodore the Studite would make this precise in the ninth century: the icon and Christ share not one nature but one hypostasis (person) — the icon depicts the one Person of the incarnate Word as He appeared in the flesh, so that the icon is “Christ” in the way a name or a shadow bears its owner, by relation and reference, not by consubstantiality (Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons [Antirrheticus] III; trans. Roth, SVS Press, 1981; see Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument). The material of the icon remains ordinary material; what makes it holy is the relation it bears to the holy one it names and the grace that rests upon the image so named and blessed (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1).

This is also why Orthodox theology can speak of icons as sanctified and even, in particular cases, as wonderworking, without collapsing into a magical view of matter. The icon belongs to the same economy as the water of Baptism, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and the oil of Unction — material things through which, by the Holy Spirit, God works the salvation of embodied persons (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.16; trans. Louth, SVS Press, 2003; see The Holy Mysteries). John of Damascus states the principle in its sharpest form: “I do not worship matter, but I worship the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material and deigned to dwell in matter, and who through matter worked my salvation” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16; trans. Louth). The icon is a consequence of the Incarnation’s sanctification of the material world, not an exception to the prohibition of idols (see The Image of God and the Incarnation).

Why This Is the Opposite of an Idol

The iconoclasts charged that to venerate an image is to worship an idol, in flat violation of the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4–5). The whole Orthodox answer turns on the difference between an idol and an icon, and it is a difference of reference, not of appearance. An idol is an image of a false god — of a being that does not exist, or of a creature set in the place of the Creator; its “prototype” is nothing, or is a demon, and so the honor paid to it terminates in the object itself or in a lie (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1, on the idol–icon distinction; Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons, Princeton, 1990, ch. 3). An icon is an image of a real person who truly lived and truly bears the grace of God — supremely of the incarnate Son who was “seen and handled” (1 John 1:1) — and the honor paid to it passes through it to that person and, in the saints, to God who is glorified in them.

The Fathers pressed the point that the God who forbade idols in Exodus 20 also commanded images in the same books — the golden cherubim overshadowing the Ark (Exodus 25:18–22), the woven cherubim of the tabernacle (Exodus 26:1), the carved cherubim and palm trees of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6:23–29), the bronze serpent that healed (Numbers 21:8–9) — so that the prohibition cannot be a blanket ban on religious imagery but a ban on idols, images of what is not God treated as God (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.15–16; see The Old Testament Prohibition and Its Fulfillment). The icon does not compete with the worship of God; it confesses the God who became visible and honors those He has made holy.

The Icon as a Means of Communion

Because the icon makes its prototype present and carries honor and prayer to that prototype, its native setting is not the museum but the act of prayer. The faithful venerate icons with a kiss, a bow, a candle, and incense — bodily acts of honor directed through the image to the one portrayed — and in venerating the icon they enter into communion with the Church triumphant, the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) whose faces surround the worshipper in the temple (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982; see Veneration, the Iconostasis, and the Icon Corner). The icon is thus an instrument of the Church’s fundamental confession that in Christ heaven and earth are joined, that the saints are alive in God, and that the material world is capable of bearing and communicating grace.

This is the reality the whole subsequent history defends. The Iconoclast controversy, the treatises of John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, and the definition of the Seventh Ecumenical Council are all, in the end, a working-out of this single conviction: that because the invisible God has made Himself visible, His image and the images of His saints may be made, venerated, and loved, as windows through which the light of the Kingdom reaches the one who prays (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; Pelikan, Imago Dei, 1990). What an icon is — a means of communion, not an idol — is therefore the seed of everything that follows in this collection.

References

John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics Series), 2003. (I.15–16, the sanctification of matter and the idol–icon distinction; the “I do not worship matter” passage.)
Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons (the Antirrhetici). Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 1981. (The hypostatic likeness of image and prototype.)
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.”)
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The icon as means of communion; participation without identity; the idol–icon distinction.)
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982. (The icon as theology in line and color; the icon and the communion of saints.)
Sendler, Egon. The Icon: Image of the Invisible. Trans. Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1988. (The transparency of the icon to its prototype.)
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. (The theological structure of the iconophile case.)
Scripture: Colossians 1:15; Genesis 1:26–27; Exodus 20:4–5; 25:18–22; Numbers 21:8–9; 1 John 1:1; Hebrews 12:1.