The Icon as Tradition in Color

The holy icon is Tradition made visible — “theology in color,” the faith confessed not in words but in image. This file expounds the icon as a bearer of Tradition on the same footing as the written word: the Seventh Ecumenical Council’s explicit linkage of image and Scripture, the appeal to unwritten Tradition in the defense of the icons, the confession of the Incarnation the icon embodies, and the Triumph of Orthodoxy as the vindication of the visual Tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Theology in Color

The Orthodox Church confesses her faith not only in Scripture, Creed, and hymn but in the holy icon. The icon is not a decoration nor merely a didactic picture; it is a bearer of Holy Tradition, a confession of the faith in line and color that stands alongside the confession in words. The phrase “theology in color,” popularized in the modern era through Eugene Trubetskoi’s essays on the Russian icon, captures the claim precisely: the icon is a mode of theology, transmitting the same faith the councils defined, through the eye rather than the ear (Trubetskoi, Icons: Theology in Color, SVS Press, 1973; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1978, on the icon as a dogmatic confession). For the doctrine of Tradition, the icon is a crucial case, because in defending it the Church made explicit that Tradition is handed on through the image as truly as through the text.

The Seventh Council: Image and Word Together

The decisive statement is the definition of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II (787), which restored the veneration of icons against iconoclasm. The council did not treat images as a lesser or optional supplement to the written word; it set image and word deliberately in parallel as two modes of one confession. Its Definition declares that the making and honoring of icons agrees with “the preaching of the Gospel,” for the two confirm one another: “what speech conveys in words, painting shows silently by representation,” and both hand on the same Incarnation (Nicaea II, 787, Definition; trans. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 1990; and see Holy Icons). The council explicitly grounds the icon in Tradition, defining that images are to be venerated “in accordance with the tradition, both written and unwritten, of the catholic Church” — placing the image among the very deposits of paradosis (Nicaea II, 787, Definition; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 30–34).

This parallel of image and word is theologically weighty. It means that the icon is not merely permitted but is a proper vehicle of the faith, capable of confessing dogma. When the council decreed that the honor paid to the image “passes to the prototype” — a formula drawn from St. Basil — and that the veneration is relative (proskynesis), not the worship (latreia) due to God alone, it was defining the icon’s place with the same care it gave to a doctrinal horos, because the icon confesses a doctrine: that the invisible God became truly visible in the flesh, and can therefore be depicted (Nicaea II, 787; Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45, on honor passing to the prototype; John of Damascus, On the Divine Images I; see St. John of Damascus).

The Icon as Confession of the Incarnation

The heart of the iconographic defense — worked out by St. John of Damascus in the eighth century and St. Theodore the Studite in the ninth — is that the icon is inseparable from the Incarnation, and that to reject the icon is finally to reject or diminish the reality of God’s becoming flesh. The Damascene’s argument is classic: the Old Testament rightly forbade images of the invisible and uncircumscribable God, for “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18); but “when you see the bodiless become man for your sake, then you may accomplish the figure of a human form; when the invisible becomes visible in the flesh, then you may draw a likeness of what has been seen” (John of Damascus, On the Divine Images I.8; trans. Anderson, SVS Press, 1980). The icon of Christ is a confession that God has truly assumed a depictable human nature; to deny that He may be depicted is to deny that His flesh was real, and so to fall back toward the old Docetic and Manichean errors (John of Damascus, On the Divine Images I; Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons; see St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore the Studite).

Thus the icon carries the whole dogma of the Incarnation, and with it the reality of matter’s sanctification and of the deified humanity of Christ and the saints. This is why the iconoclast controversy was never, for the Orthodox, a quarrel about art or piety but a Christological crisis: the image was a dogmatic frontier, and the defense of the icon was the defense of the Incarnation itself. The icon is Tradition in color precisely because it hands on, through the eye, the same confession the councils defined in words (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 1978; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 30–34).

The Triumph of Orthodoxy

The vindication of the visual Tradition is commemorated in one of Orthodoxy’s most significant feasts. When the veneration of icons was finally and definitively restored in 843 under the Empress Theodora, after the second, later phase of iconoclasm, the event was celebrated as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” and fixed on the first Sunday of Great Lent, where it is kept to this day (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 32–33; and see Holy Icons). The name is telling: the restoration of the icons was received not as the settlement of one more controversy but as the triumph of Orthodoxy as such — as though the whole faith stood or fell with the image. The Synodikon of Orthodoxy, read on that Sunday, proclaims the memory of the defenders of the icons and anathematizes their opponents, and it enshrines the principle that the icon is part of the received Tradition: “As the prophets beheld, as the Apostles taught,… as the Church has received,… so we believe, so we speak,… this is the faith of the Fathers, this is the faith that has established the whole world” (the Synodikon of Orthodoxy; trans. in Ware, The Orthodox Church, and standard liturgical texts). The visual Tradition is here explicitly aligned with the prophetic, apostolic, and patristic Tradition — one faith, handed on in word and image alike.

The Icon and the Discipline of Tradition

A final point belongs to the doctrine of Tradition. The icon shows that Tradition governs not only what is confessed but how it is depicted: Orthodox iconography follows a received canon of forms, types, and conventions, precisely because the icon is a confession and not a private invention. The iconographer works within the Tradition, transmitting established prototypes rather than expressing individual imagination, so that the icon is a communal and traditional act — Tradition handing on Tradition (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 1978, on the canonical character of iconography; and the fuller treatment in Holy Icons). This is the visual analogue of the whole account of Tradition in this compendium: the received forms (the small-t prototypes) are the faithful vehicles of the one living faith (the capital-T Tradition), and fidelity is not stagnant repetition but the living transmission of a confession that remains the same because its object — the Incarnate Word, seen and depicted — remains the same. In the icon, Tradition becomes visible; and in venerating it, the faithful confess with their eyes the faith they profess with their lips.

References

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Ed. Norman P. Tanner. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Nicaea II 787, Definition; image and word; the written and unwritten Tradition.)
John of Damascus. On the Divine Images (Three Treatises on the Divine Images). Trans. Andrew Louth or David Anderson. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980/2003. (I.8, the depictability of the Incarnate; honor to the prototype.)
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978. (The icon as dogmatic confession; the canon of iconography.)
Trubetskoi, Eugene. Icons: Theology in Color. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973. (Theology in color.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Iconoclasm, Nicaea II, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, pp. 30–34.)
Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 18.45. Trans. Anderson, SVS Press, 1980. (The honor passing to the prototype.)
The Synodikon of Orthodoxy (843), read on the Sunday of Orthodoxy. (Standard liturgical texts.)