Circumscription and Veneration

Theodore’s two decisive refinements of the icon theology of Nicaea II and St. John of Damascus: first, the doctrine of the hypostatic image — that every image is the image of a hypostasis (a person), never of a nature, so that the icon depicts the person of the incarnate Christ in His circumscribable humanity, sharing His hypostasis but not His essence; and second, the careful distinction of proskynesis (relative veneration, which passes to the prototype) from latreia (the adoration owed to God alone). The conceptual core of the Orthodox theology of the icon.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

What Theodore Added

By the time Theodore wrote, the Orthodox case for the icons already had two great foundations. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) had defined their veneration and grounded it in the Incarnation and in the Basilian principle that the honor passes to the prototype; St. John of Damascus had developed the theology of the image and vindicated the dignity of matter (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils and St. John of Damascus). What was still unrefined was the most technical point of all — the precise account of what the icon represents, the point on which the iconoclasts’ Christological dilemma turned (set out at The Three Antirrhetics). Theodore’s distinctive achievement is to have sharpened the theology at exactly this point, with two linked refinements: the hypostatic analysis of the image, and the precise grading of veneration (Tollefsen, St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons, 2018, pp. 80–160; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 185–220).

Circumscription: The Incarnate Word Is Depictable

The first refinement concerns circumscription (perigraphe). To be circumscribable (perigraptos) is to have an outline — a shape, a location, a definite extension — such that one can be delimited and so depicted; to be uncircumscribable (aperigraptos) is to be without outline, as the divine nature is. The iconoclasts treated circumscribability as the mark of the creaturely and the depictable as therefore unworthy of the divine. Theodore turns this on its head: in the Incarnation, the uncircumscribable Word truly assumed a circumscribable human nature, with a body, a face, a place in Galilee and Jerusalem — and to deny that the incarnate Christ is circumscribable is to deny that He truly took a human nature, which is to deny the Incarnation (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 40–110). Circumscribability is not, for Theodore, a defect that the Incarnation regrettably entails; it is a property of the real humanity that the Word genuinely made His own. Christ is perigraptos in His humanity and aperigraptos in His divinity, both at once, in one person — and it is the circumscribable humanity that the icon depicts.

The Hypostatic Image

The second and more original refinement answers the question the iconoclast dilemma pressed: if the icon depicts a nature, it must depict either the divinity (impossible, blasphemous) or a separated humanity (Nestorian). Theodore escapes the dilemma by denying its premise. An icon does not depict a nature at all. Every image is the image of a hypostasis — a person — and never of a nature (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 80–140; Cholij, pp. 185–220). This is the axis of his whole theology of the icon.

What does this mean? A nature (humanity, divinity) is universal and common — “humanity” is shared by all human beings and has no face of its own to be drawn. What is depicted in any portrait is always a particular person in his individuating features: not “humanity” but this man, with these eyes and this bearing. So too the icon of Christ depicts not “the human nature” and not “the divine nature” but the one person of the incarnate Word — Jesus Christ Himself, who is the eternal Son — in the visible, individual, circumscribable features of His humanity. The iconoclast dilemma collapses, because the icon was never depicting a nature to begin with; it depicts a person, and that person is the one Christ, true God and true man, undivided.

From this follows the precise relation of icon to prototype. The icon and Christ are one in hypostasis but other in essence (ousia): the image on the panel and the Lord it represents are the same person — the icon is Christ’s icon, His and no one else’s, identical in hypostasis to its archetype — yet they are utterly different in being, the one wood and pigment, the other the living God-man (Theodore, Antirrhetici II–III; trans. Roth, On the Holy Icons, 1981; Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 110–160). This is why the icon truly is an image of Christ and not a mere reminder: it shares His very person. And it is why venerating the icon is venerating Christ — for the hypostasis is one. The likeness need not be a naturalistic reproduction; it need only be sufficient to identify the person, for what unites image and prototype is not a perfect resemblance of features but the identity of the hypostasis they share (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 140–180).

Veneration: Proskynesis and Latreia

The hypostatic analysis grounds the distinction that guards the practice from idolatry. Theodore inherits from the tradition — Basil, Nicaea II, John of Damascus — the careful separation of two kinds of honor (Cholij, pp. 200–220; cf. St. John of Damascus):

Latreia — the worship, adoration, service of cultus that is owed to God alone, to the Holy Trinity and to nothing else whatever. This may never be given to an icon, a saint, or any creature.
Proskynesis — the bow or veneration of honor, which admits of degrees and may rightly be shown to what is worthy of honor: to the Theotokos and the saints, to the Cross and the Gospel book, to holy places, and to the icons.

The veneration of an icon is relative (schetike) proskynesis: it is directed not to the wood and paint as such but, through the image, to the person depicted, and it terminates in that person, not in the material. “The honor passes to the prototype” — the principle Basil first stated of the imperial image and Nicaea II made dogma — means exactly that the bow before the icon of Christ is a bow to Christ, the bow before the icon of a saint a bow to the saint, while the material panel is honored only as the image, never as divine (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45; Theodore, Antirrhetici III; trans. Roth, 1981). Because the icon shares the hypostasis of its prototype, the veneration can genuinely reach the person; because it differs in essence and the worship of latreia is reserved to God alone, the practice never becomes idolatry. The two refinements thus work together: the hypostatic image secures the reality of icon-veneration (it really reaches Christ), and the proskynesis/latreia distinction secures its limit (it is never the worship of God).

The Philosophical Vocabulary

Theodore’s whole argument turns on a distinction the Greek Fathers had forged in the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, and which he now brings to bear, with new precision, on the question of the image: the distinction between nature (physis, ousia) and hypostasis (prosopon, the concrete particular person). A nature is what a thing is — the common, universal quality shared by all the members of a kind: “humanity” is the nature common to Peter and Paul and every other human being, “divinity” the nature common to the three Persons of the Trinity. A hypostasis is who or which one — the particular, individuated subsistence in which a nature actually exists, marked off from all others by its own distinguishing properties (idiomata): not humanity-in-general but this man, Peter, with his own face, voice, and history (Tollefsen, St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons, 2018, pp. 80–140). The universal does not exist on its own but only as concretely realized in particulars: there is no “humanity” walking about apart from individual human beings, and — crucially for the icon — no face that belongs to “humanity” as such, only the faces of particular persons.

This is why Theodore can say that what a portrait depicts is always a hypostasis and never a nature. A painter who set out to depict “humanity” would have nothing to draw, for the universal has no visible outline of its own; he can only ever depict some particular person in his individuating features, and in depicting those features he depicts the one whose features they are (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 110–160). The logic is perfectly general — it holds of every portrait of every person — and this generality is what defeats the iconoclast. The icon of Christ is subject to no special rule: like any image it depicts a who, and the who is the one hypostasis of the incarnate Word, at once true God and true man. The natures, divine and human, are not the objects of the depiction but the contents of the person depicted; the icon shows the person, who possesses both. So the question “which nature does the icon depict?” — on which Constantine V had built his dilemma — is simply malformed. It assumes that images are of natures, and they never are (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 80–180; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 185–220). Theodore’s achievement is to have seen that the entire iconoclast case rested on a single category-mistake, and to have dissolved it not by a new dogma but by a clearer grasp of the grammar of “image” that the Cappadocian and Chalcedonian vocabulary already implied.

The Doctrine and the Making of Icons

Because what unites image and prototype is the identity of the hypostasis and not a perfect reproduction of features, the hypostatic doctrine bears directly on what an icon must — and need not — be. It need not be a naturalistic likeness in the manner of a photograph; what it must do is bear enough of a recognizable likeness (homoiotes) to identify the person whose image it is, to be unmistakably the image of this one and no other (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 140–180). This is why the icon carries the name of the person inscribed upon it: the inscription, with the characteristic features that tradition fixes for each saint, completes the identification and seals the image to its prototype. The likeness need only be sufficient for recognition because it is not the likeness that makes the image reach its archetype — the shared hypostasis does that. An icon is therefore not a devotional aid that merely reminds the worshipper of an absent person; it is, on Theodore’s analysis, a real presence of the person by way of his image, identical to him in hypostasis though utterly other in essence (Theodore, Antirrhetici II–III [PG 99:327–436]; trans. Roth, On the Holy Icons, 1981; Cholij, pp. 185–220).

It is this understanding that the later Orthodox tradition would draw out in its familiar image of the icon as a “window” — not a portrait one looks at but an opening one looks through, a true point of contact with the holy person it depicts, through which veneration passes to its prototype and grace is held to descend. The metaphor is later than Theodore and should not be put in his mouth, but the theology it expresses is continuous with his hypostatic analysis: if the icon shares the very person of the one it depicts, then to stand before it is in a real sense to stand before him, and the honor given to it genuinely reaches him (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 140–180; cf. The Three Antirrhetics). At the same time the doctrine builds in its own safeguard against idolatry. Precisely because image and prototype are other in essence, the wood and pigment are never themselves the object of worship; they are honored only as the image, and the veneration that passes through them terminates in the living person, never in the material. The same analysis that makes the icon a true contact with Christ forbids it ever becoming an idol — the reality of the icon and the impossibility of idolatry are, for Theodore, two faces of the one hypostatic truth (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 140–180; Cholij, pp. 200–220).

Refining, Not Replacing, the Tradition

Theodore would have been the last to claim he had invented this doctrine, and he had not. His circumscription argument develops the Incarnation-based case of Nicaea II and John of Damascus; his proskynesis/latreia distinction is the council’s own; his “honor to the prototype” is Basil’s. What is genuinely his is the hypostatic precision — the insistence that the image is of a person and not a nature — which broke the one argument his predecessors had left standing, the Christological dilemma of Constantine V (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 80–180; Cholij, pp. 185–220). With that precision the theology of the icon was complete. The Church’s later reflection on the icon — its account of the image as a true point of contact with the holy person it depicts, a “window” rather than a portrait — is continuous with Theodore’s hypostatic analysis (see The Three Antirrhetics). When the icons were restored for good in 843, it was on the theology that John of Damascus had founded and Theodore the Studite had perfected (see Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy).

References

Tollefsen, Torstein Theodor. St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons: Theology and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Byzantium. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (The standard study; the hypostatic image, circumscription, and the relation of image to prototype.)
Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons. Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series 6. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (The three Refutations and supporting works.)
Theodore the Studite. Antirrhetici tres adversus iconomachos, PG 99:327–436 (Migne, 1860).
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the hypostatic image and the modes of veneration.)
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.45 [PG 32:149C]; trans. NPNF II/8. (The honor of the image passing to the prototype.)
The Horos (Definition) of the Second Council of Nicaea (787); trans. NPNF II/14. (The conciliar distinction of proskynesis from latreia.)