The Image of God and the Incarnation

The whole Orthodox theology of the icon rests on a single dogmatic fact: that in Christ the invisible God became visible, “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), and so may now be depicted. This file sets out the incarnational argument at the heart of the tradition — from Scripture, through St. John of Damascus’ decisive formulation, to Theodore the Studite’s insistence that to deny the icon of Christ is to deny His enfleshment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Invisible Made Visible

The foundation of the icon is not a theory of art but the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Old Testament is emphatic that God has no visible form: at Horeb “you saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deuteronomy 4:12, 15), and “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18). Precisely for this reason God could not, in that dispensation, be depicted — an image of the formless and invisible would be a lie, and any attempt to make one collapses into idolatry (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.4–8; trans. Louth, SVS Press, 2003). The iconophile Fathers concede this fully; their argument is that something has changed.

What changed is the Incarnation. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (John 1:14); “God was manifested in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16); the eternal Son is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), the one in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9); He is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint (charakter) of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). The apostles testify to a God who could be seen and touched: “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). The invisible God, without ceasing to be invisible in His divine nature, has taken a visible human nature and a human face; and what can be seen can be depicted (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16; Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei, Princeton, 1990, ch. 4).

John of Damascus’ Argument

St. John of Damascus (c. 676–749), writing in the first decades of the controversy from the safety of the Umayyad Caliphate beyond the reach of the Byzantine emperors, gave the argument its classic form. In the most-quoted sentence of the whole iconophile corpus he draws the line exactly at the Incarnation:

“In former times God, being without form or body, could in no way be depicted. But now, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among human beings, I make an image of the God who can be seen. I do not venerate matter, but I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to dwell in matter, and through matter accomplished my salvation” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16; trans. Louth, SVS Press, 2003).

Two moves are compressed here. First, the ground of the icon is the visibility that the Incarnation confers: to make an image of Christ is not to presume to depict the undepictable Godhead but to depict the human face that God has genuinely assumed (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.4; II.5). Second, the Incarnation vindicates matter itself. Against any lingering contempt for the material — whether from a Manichaean dualism or an over-spiritualized piety — John insists that the God who created matter “very good” (Genesis 1:31) has now honored it beyond all expectation by becoming material, so that matter has become a vehicle of salvation: the wood of the Cross, the ink of the Gospels, the water of Baptism, the bread and wine of the altar, and the paint of the icon are all matter through which grace comes (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16; II.14; Andrew Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford, 2002, ch. 9). The icon is therefore not an intrusion on the Incarnation but one of its natural fruits: to refuse the image of the incarnate Christ is, at root, to be embarrassed by the flesh He took.

John also insists that the icon serves the unlettered and the whole embodied person: what the written word is to those who can read, the image is to those who cannot, “a book for the illiterate,” raising the mind through the senses to the prototype (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.17; a theme he shares with Gregory the Great and Basil). The point is not merely pedagogical, however; the deeper claim is that human beings, being body and soul, come to God through the senses as well as the intellect, and that God has accommodated Himself to exactly this by becoming visible (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.12; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 1).

The Christological Sharpening: To Deny the Icon Is to Deny the Flesh

What John founded, St. Theodore the Studite (759–826) and the Fathers of Nicaea II sharpened into a Christological dilemma. If Christ cannot be depicted, they argued, then one of two errors must follow. Either He did not truly take a circumscribable human body — which is Docetism or a form of Manichaeism, the denial that the Son really became flesh — or His humanity was so absorbed by His divinity as to be undepictable, which is a Monophysite confusion of the natures (Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons [Antirrheticus] I; trans. Roth, SVS Press, 1981; see Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument). The icon of Christ thus becomes a confession of orthodox Christology: it asserts that the Son is genuinely and fully human, “like us in all things but sin” (Chalcedon, 451, Definition, echoing Hebrews 4:15), circumscribable, seeable, and therefore depictable, precisely as He is also God (Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, Brill, 1996, ch. 4). The iconophiles could therefore claim that they, not the iconoclasts, were defending the Council of Chalcedon: to make the icon of Christ is to confess the two natures in the one Person, while to forbid it tends toward denying the reality of the human nature (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; Pelikan, Imago Dei, 1990, ch. 5).

This is why the icon of Christ occupies the theological center of the whole system. Because Christ is the Image of the Father made visible, the icon of Christ is possible; and because it is possible, the icons of the Theotokos and the saints follow, for they too are members of His Body who bear His grace and were themselves visible human persons (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.10; see The Icons of Christ). The Incarnation is the hinge: it does not merely permit the icon but, on the iconophile reading, requires it, since to confess that God became genuinely visible flesh is already to confess that His flesh can be shown.

The Weight of the Argument

The incarnational argument gives the Orthodox defense of icons its peculiar force and its limits. Its force is that it grounds the icon in the central mystery of the faith, so that iconoclasm can be presented not as a scruple about art but as a Christological error touching the reality of the Incarnation (Theodore the Studite, Antirrheticus I; Nicaea II, Horos). Its limit is equally clear and was respected by the tradition: the icon depicts Christ as incarnate, in His visible human form, and never presumes to depict the divine nature as such, which remains invisible and uncircumscribable (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.4; III.6). This is why Orthodox tradition has been cautious about direct images of God the Father and of the divine essence, and why the classic image of the Trinity is the hospitality of Abraham — the three angelic visitors of Genesis 18 — rather than any attempt to portray the Godhead in itself (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 2, on the depiction of the Trinity; the Moscow Council of 1666–1667 later criticized certain images of God the Father). The icon lives entirely within the space the Incarnation opened: the space in which the invisible God has a visible face, and that face may be shown, honored, and loved.

See Also

• The Old Testament Prohibition and Its Fulfillment — the Second Commandment and how the Incarnation transforms it
• The Icon as a Window to Heaven — the sacred image as means of communion
• John of Damascus and the Defense — the fuller treatment of the Damascene’s case
• Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument — the icon and the circumscribability of the incarnate Word
• St. John of Damascus — the collection on the first great defender
• Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm — the hub essay this collection expands

References

• John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 2003. (I.4–17; II.5–14; III.6–12: the incarnational ground; “In former times God… could in no way be depicted”; the sanctification of matter.)
• Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons (the Antirrhetici). Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 1981. (The Christological dilemma; the icon as confession of the flesh.)
• Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Pelikan, Jaroslav. Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. (The incarnational and Christological structure of the case.)
• Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
• Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The image and the senses; the depiction of the Trinity.)
• Scripture: Colossians 1:15; 2:9; John 1:14, 18; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:3; 4:15; 1 John 1:1; Deuteronomy 4:12, 15; Genesis 1:31; 18.
• Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of Faith.