St. Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument

St. Theodore the Studite (759–826), the great defender of the icons in the second iconoclasm, gave the iconophile case its most rigorous form: the icon does not depict a nature but names a person (hypostasis), so that the very fact that the incarnate Word is circumscribable and depictable is the confession that He truly became an individual, describable man. This file sets out Theodore’s Christological argument in On the Holy Icons and how it answered Constantine V’s dilemma.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Problem Theodore Inherited

The iconoclast emperor Constantine V had framed a sharp Christological dilemma against the icon (see The Imperial Iconoclasm 726–787). Any image of Christ, he argued, must “circumscribe” something. If it circumscribes His divinity, it confuses and confounds the divine nature with the human — a Monophysite error, since the Godhead is uncircumscribable. If it circumscribes His humanity alone, it separates the two natures and depicts a mere man distinct from the divine Word — a Nestorian error. Either way the icon of Christ is Christologically incoherent and should be rejected (Constantine V, Peuseis, in the fragments preserved by Nikephoros; Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, Brill, 1996, ch. 2; Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, Princeton, 2002). This was the most serious argument iconoclasm produced, because it did not appeal merely to the Old Testament prohibition but claimed the high ground of orthodox Christology, presenting the iconoclasts as the true guardians of Chalcedon.

St. Theodore, abbot of the great monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople and the organizer of the iconophile resistance under Leo V, answered this dilemma in his three Refutations of the Iconoclasts (Antirrhetici), translated as On the Holy Icons (Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth, SVS Press, 1981; see St. Theodore the Studite). His answer turned the dilemma inside out.

The Decisive Distinction: The Icon Depicts a Person, Not a Nature

Theodore’s central move is to insist that an image never depicts a nature at all — it depicts a person (hypostasis), an individual, in his particular, describable features. No painter paints “humanity” in the abstract; he paints this man, with these features, this face, this stance. What is portrayable is the individual hypostasis, seen in its distinguishing characteristics (Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons [Antirrheticus] III.A; trans. Roth; Parry, Depicting the Word, ch. 4; Barber, Figure and Likeness, 2002, ch. 4). This dissolves Constantine’s dilemma at a stroke: the icon of Christ does not circumscribe either nature as such — not the divinity (which is invisible and uncircumscribable) and not “humanity in general” — but portrays the one Person of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, in the visible individual features He assumed when He became this particular man, born of the Virgin (Theodore, On the Holy Icons III.A–B; III.34).

The Word, in becoming incarnate, did not assume a generic, unindividuated human nature but became a concrete, particular man — circumscribed in place and time, describable in face and form — while remaining, in the same one Person, the uncircumscribable God (Theodore, On the Holy Icons I.2–4; III.C). Therefore the fact that Christ can be depicted is not a threat to His divinity but the proof of His genuine humanity: “If Christ cannot be depicted, then He was not truly born a describable man, and the Incarnation is a phantasm” (a paraphrase of Theodore’s argument; On the Holy Icons I.2–7; III.34; Parry, Depicting the Word, ch. 4). Circumscribability (perigraphe) is a property of the human, and to deny that Christ is circumscribable is to deny that He truly took a complete, individual humanity — which is a form of Docetism or of the Monophysite dissolution of the human nature into the divine (Theodore, On the Holy Icons I.7; III.C).

Uncircumscribable in Divinity, Circumscribable in Flesh

Theodore holds the two together with precision. In His divine nature the Son is uncircumscribable, infinite, invisible — and in that respect no image is made of Him. In His human nature, freely assumed, He is circumscribable, visible, describable — born, growing, eating, suffering, seen with human eyes — and in that respect His icon is made. But because there is only one Person in Christ, the icon of the circumscribable flesh is truly the icon of the Son of God, for the flesh is His own, the flesh of the one divine Person, and not the flesh of some other subject (Theodore, On the Holy Icons I.4; III.C; Barber, Figure and Likeness, ch. 4). This is why the iconophiles could claim that they, not the iconoclasts, were the true Chalcedonians: the icon confesses one Person in two natures, the human circumscribable and the divine not, without confusing or dividing them. To reject the icon, Theodore argues, is in effect to reject either the reality of the human nature (Monophysitism, Docetism) or the unity of the Person (Nestorianism) — precisely the errors the iconoclasts accused the iconophiles of, now shown to lodge in iconoclasm itself (Theodore, On the Holy Icons III.C; Parry, Depicting the Word, ch. 4).

The Icon and the Prototype: Relation, Not Consubstantiality

Theodore also refined the relation between the icon and Christ, against the iconoclast objection that if the icon is truly “Christ” it must share His essence (which is absurd for wood and paint), while if it does not it is a mere idol. His answer, developing Basil’s principle, is that the icon is related to its prototype not by identity of essence (ousia) but by identity of hypostasis through likeness — the icon bears the name and the personal likeness of Christ, so that the one Christ is present in His icon “by relation” (schetikos) and by name, as a person is present in his portrait or his shadow, without the portrait being consubstantial with the man (Theodore, On the Holy Icons I.11–12; III.A.34; Barber, Figure and Likeness, ch. 4). The veneration therefore terminates not in the wood but in Christ, and there is one veneration of Christ and His icon because there is one hypostasis named in both — while the material of the icon remains ordinary material, honored only for the sake of the one it names (Theodore, On the Holy Icons III.A; see Image and Prototype).

The Weight of Theodore’s Achievement

Where John of Damascus had grounded the icon broadly — in the Incarnation, in the goodness of matter, in the kinds of image and worship, in tradition — Theodore drove the argument to its Christological point and met the iconoclasts on their strongest ground. His contribution is threefold: he located the depictability of Christ in the hypostasis rather than the nature, and so answered Constantine’s dilemma; he made the icon a test of orthodox Christology, so that iconoclasm stands convicted of the very heresies it charged; and he clarified the icon–prototype relation as one of hypostatic likeness and name rather than shared essence (Parry, Depicting the Word, ch. 4; Barber, Figure and Likeness, 2002). This is the theology that stands behind the settled Orthodox confession that the icon of Christ is the confession of His true and complete humanity, inseparable from His divinity in the one Person of the Word — the doctrine defined at Nicaea II and sealed in the Triumph of Orthodoxy (see The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787)).

See Also

References

  • Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons (the three Antirrhetici / Refutations of the Iconoclasts). Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 1981. (I.2–12; III.A–C, III.34: the hypostatic argument; circumscribability; the icon–prototype relation.)
  • Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1996. (Ch. 2 and 4: Constantine V’s dilemma and Theodore’s and Nikephoros’ answers.)
  • Barber, Charles. Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. (The hypostasis, circumscription, and the icon–prototype relation.)
  • Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (Theodore’s life, resistance, and theology.)
  • The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Trans. Richard Price. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018.