Processions and Wonderworking Icons

The Orthodox tradition testifies that God works through particular icons — the “wonderworking” (thaumaturgos) images carried in procession, credited with deliverances and healings, and the myrrh-streaming icons. This file reports these traditions soberly and per METHODOLOGY §3.5: pinned to their earliest naming and dating, told as what the sources attest, neither dismissed as fable nor asserted as documented fact.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Category and How It Is Handled Here

Certain icons are venerated as wonderworking — associated by long tradition with miracles: healings, the deliverance of cities, the answering of prayer. The theology underlying the category is the theology of the icon itself: since the honor and the grace pass to and from the prototype, God may be pleased to manifest His grace through a particular image, as He worked healings through the hem of Christ’s garment (Matthew 9:20–22) and even through cloths that had touched St. Paul (Acts 19:11–12) (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 1). The Church does not hold that the icon “works” the wonder of itself, as a talisman; it holds that God works through it, and it attributes the wonder to God and to the intercession of the one depicted (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982).

Per the repository methodology (§3.5), the miracle-accounts below are reported as what the tradition attests, with their earliest attestation named where it can be, and are not certified as historical fact. Many of the founding narratives are known first from later liturgical and hagiographic sources, and the honest course is to name the provenance and let it stand as the Church’s testimony rather than as documented history.

Processions and the Hodegetria of Constantinople

The public procession of icons is ancient. In Byzantine Constantinople the great Hodegetria icon of the Theotokos — believed to be the icon painted by St. Luke (a tradition treated as apocryphal; see The Icons of the Theotokos and the Saints) — was the object of a famous weekly rite: every Tuesday it was carried through the city, and eyewitnesses (including foreign visitors in the late Byzantine period) describe the heavy icon being borne aloft, apparently turning and moving, by a single bearer of the Hodegoi confraternity in a spectacle understood as miraculous (Bissera Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, Penn State, 2006, on the Tuesday procession and its late-medieval eyewitnesses). The Hodegetria functioned as the palladium of the city, carried on the walls in time of siege; it was lost at the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 2006). The Byzantine sources also credit the intercession of the Theotokos, invoked through her icons and relics, with the deliverance of the city from the Avar-Persian siege of 626 — the occasion, by tradition, of the Akathist hymn’s proem “To thee, the Champion Leader” (the connection of the 626 deliverance with the Akathist is itself a matter of the later tradition; Averil Cameron, “The Virgin’s Robe: An Episode in the History of Early Seventh-Century Constantinople,” Byzantion 49, 1979).

The Vladimir Icon and the Deliverances of Russia

In the Russian tradition the Vladimir Mother of God — a twelfth-century Byzantine icon of the Eleousa type, brought to Rus’ and kept successively at Vyshgorod, Vladimir, and Moscow — is the most venerated of the wonderworking icons and is bound up with the memory of national deliverances (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982). Tradition credits it above all with the deliverance of Moscow from Timur (Tamerlane) in 1395: the icon was brought to Moscow, the people prayed before it, and Timur unexpectedly withdrew — an event the Church commemorates and attributes to the intercession of the Theotokos through the icon (David Miller, “Legends of the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir,” Speculum 43, 1968, on the growth of the Vladimir miracle-legends; the deliverances of 1451 and 1480 are likewise attached to the icon). [Disputed: the miracle-narratives attached to the Vladimir icon, including the 1395 deliverance from Timur, are known chiefly from later Muscovite chronicle and liturgical sources with a clear interest in linking the icon to the fortunes of Moscow; the historical fact that Timur turned back is secure, but its attribution to the icon is the Church’s devotional interpretation, reported here as such (Miller, “Legends of the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir,” 1968).]

Other Russian wonderworking Marian icons — the Kazan icon (discovered 1579, associated with deliverances in the Time of Troubles and later), the Tikhvin, the Smolensk, the Kursk Root icon of the “Sign” (venerated from the thirteenth–sixteenth centuries and carried by the Russian Church Abroad into the diaspora) — carry their own founding and miracle traditions, each first fixed in devotional and hagiographic sources of its period and venerated for centuries since (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982; the individual feast-day synaxaria record the traditions). On Athos the Iveron icon (the Portaitissa, “Keeper of the Gate”) carries the tradition of an icon cast into the sea during the iconoclast persecution and later received miraculously at the Iviron monastery — a founding legend belonging to the monastery’s tradition rather than to independent documentation (reported in the Athonite tradition; the legend is treated as such by scholars of Athos).

The Myrrh-Streaming Icons

The tradition also reports myrrh-streaming (myrrh-bearing) icons — images that are said to exude a fragrant oil or myrrh, sometimes credited with healings. Such reports occur across the history of the tradition and continue into the present. The best-documented modern instance is the Montreal Iveron icon, a copy of the Iveron Portaitissa which its guardian, Br. José (Muñoz-Cortés), reported began to stream myrrh in 1982 and continued until his murder in Athens in 1997, after which the icon disappeared; the icon was widely venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and its myrrh distributed to the faithful (the Montreal Iveron is documented in ROCOR sources and contemporary accounts of 1982–1997). [Disputed: myrrh-streaming and weeping icons are reported by many witnesses and venerated by the faithful, but they are not, and by their nature cannot be, established as documented miracles by neutral historical method; the Church receives particular such phenomena with discernment and caution, and has never dogmatized any of them. This collection reports them as attested devotional phenomena — naming the icon, the guardian, and the dates where known — and neither certifies nor dismisses them (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

The Sober Reading

Two disciplines are kept together here. On one side, the wonderworking and myrrh-streaming icons are a real and continuous part of the Orthodox tradition, expressing the faith’s conviction that grace works through matter and that the saints intercede — and they are received by the faithful with love and by the Church with veneration (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol. 1). On the other, the individual narratives are known through devotional and hagiographic transmission, often later than the events they report and shaped by the needs and the piety of the communities that told them; the Church’s own attitude has been one of discernment rather than credulity, attributing every genuine wonder to God and never to the icon as such, and canonizing no particular miracle as an article of faith (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982). The honest report, therefore, is the one this file has given: to name the tradition and its attestation, to distinguish the secure historical kernel (that Timur withdrew, that the Hodegetria was Constantinople’s palladium, that Br. José guarded a widely venerated icon) from its devotional interpretation, and to leave the weighing of the wonders to the reader and to the Church’s own careful reception.

See Also

• The Icons of the Theotokos and the Saints — the Vladimir, Kazan, and Hodegetria icons as types
• Veneration, the Iconostasis, and the Icon Corner — the ordinary veneration of icons
• The Icon as a Window to Heaven — grace through matter, the theology behind the wonders
• Orthodoxy: The Theotokos — the intercession invoked through the Marian icons
• Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm — the hub essay this collection expands

References

• Pentcheva, Bissera V. Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. (The Hodegetria, the Tuesday procession, the Marian palladia of Constantinople.)
• Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The theology of grace through the icon.)
• Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982. (The Vladimir and other wonderworking icons; the Church’s discernment.)
• Miller, David B. “Legends of the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir: A Study of the Development of Muscovite National Consciousness.” Speculum 43, no. 4 (1968): 657–670. (The growth of the Vladimir miracle-tradition, including 1395.)
• Cameron, Averil. “The Virgin’s Robe: An Episode in the History of Early Seventh-Century Constantinople.” Byzantion 49 (1979): 42–56. (The 626 deliverance and the Marian relics and icons.)
• The Montreal Iveron icon (1982–1997): documented in ROCOR and contemporary accounts of the guardianship of Br. José Muñoz-Cortés.
• Scripture: Matthew 9:20–22; Acts 19:11–12.