The Three Antirrhetics

FLAGSHIP. Theodore’s three Antirrhetici adversus iconomachos (Refutations of the Iconoclasts; PG 99:327–436; trans. Roth) — the decisive icon-theology of the second iconoclasm. Against the iconoclasts’ Christological objection, Theodore argues that the incarnate Word, having truly assumed a circumscribable human nature, is Himself depictable; that the icon’s relation to its prototype is one of identity in hypostasis but difference in being; and that the veneration owed the image is relative (proskynesis) and passes to the prototype, not the worship (latreia) owed to God alone. With the supporting works — the Seven Chapters, the Questions to the Iconoclasts, the Letter to Plato, and the Refutation of the Impious Poems — these constitute the theological completion of the case for the icons.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Works and the Translation

Theodore’s principal dogmatic answer to the second iconoclasm is the set of three Antirrhetici adversus iconomachos — literally the three “counter-statements against the icon-fighters,” conventionally the Three Refutations of the Iconoclasts. They are preserved in his collected works at PG 99:327–436 (Migne, 1860) [the column range 327–436 is reported consistently in the scholarly summaries; cited here with the standing caution that PG columns are given only where confident]. The standard English translation is Catharine P. Roth, St. Theodore the Studite: On the Holy Icons (Popular Patristics Series 6; Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981), which gathers the three Refutations together with the supporting anti-iconoclast pieces (Roth, On the Holy Icons, 1981, contents). The standard modern study of the theology is Torstein T. Tollefsen, St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons (Oxford, 2018), built principally on these three Refutations.

The three are not three independent treatises but a developing argument. They take the form of a dialogue between an “orthodox” speaker and a “heretic,” with the iconoclast’s objections stated and answered in turn — a method that lets Theodore meet the iconoclast case at its strongest, point by point (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 1–40).

The Iconoclast Objection Theodore Had to Answer

The second iconoclasm’s deepest argument was Christological, inherited from the emperor Constantine V of the first iconoclasm, and it ran as a dilemma. An icon of Christ, the iconoclasts said, must depict either His divinity or His humanity. It cannot depict the divinity, for the divine nature is uncircumscribable and invisible — to claim to depict it is blasphemy. And it cannot depict the humanity alone, for Christ’s humanity never existed on its own, separate from the divinity — to depict the man apart from the God is to divide Christ, the heresy of Nestorius. Either way, the iconoclasts concluded, the icon of Christ is heretical: it either confounds the natures or divides them (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 40–80; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 185–220). This was the argument St. John of Damascus, writing earlier and from outside the empire, had not fully met — John’s defense rested chiefly on the Incarnation and the dignity of matter (see St. John of Damascus). Theodore’s task was to break the dilemma.

The Circumscribability of the Incarnate Word

Theodore breaks it by insisting on the full reality of the Incarnation and its consequence: a real human nature is, of its very nature, circumscribable (perigraptos) — it has a shape, a face, a place, a definite outline that can be depicted. The Word, in becoming man, assumed precisely such a nature. Therefore the incarnate Christ is depictable, not in spite of the Incarnation but because of it; and to deny that Christ can be depicted is to deny that He truly assumed a human nature at all — which is to undo the Incarnation:

“If Christ cannot be depicted, then He was not truly born, He did not truly become man — and our salvation is overthrown.” (the substance of Theodore’s argument, Antirrhetici I; cf. trans. Roth, On the Holy Icons, 1981; Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 40–80)

The iconoclast, in refusing the icon, is thus driven (Theodore argues) into one of two heresies of his own: either he denies the reality of Christ’s humanity (a kind of docetism), or he holds the humanity to have been so swallowed up in the divinity as to lose its proper, circumscribable character (a kind of monophysitism). The orthodox confession of one Christ in two natures requires that the human nature keep its own properties — including its circumscribability — and therefore requires that Christ be depictable. The icon, far from threatening Chalcedon, is a corollary of it (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 40–110).

Image and Prototype: The Hypostatic Solution

The hardest point — and Theodore’s most original contribution — concerns what the icon depicts. If it depicts a nature, the iconoclast dilemma bites. Theodore’s answer is that the icon depicts neither nature as such but a person, a hypostasis. His formula is exact: every image is the image of a hypostasis, and never of a nature (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 80–140; Cholij, pp. 185–220). What the icon of Christ portrays is not “the divine nature” or “a human nature” but the one person of the incarnate Word — Jesus Christ Himself, this particular man who is the eternal Son — in His visible, circumscribable, human appearance. The natures are not what is pictured; the person is, in His individuating human features. By relocating depiction from nature to hypostasis, Theodore dissolves the dilemma: the icon neither circumscribes the divinity (which is not what is depicted) nor divides off a humanity (for the person depicted is the one Christ, God and man). This refinement is the burden of the second and third Refutations, and it is examined more fully in the companion file (see Circumscription and Veneration).

The Relation of Veneration

To the question of why the image may be venerated, Theodore gives the answer the tradition had received from St. Basil and St. John of Damascus, sharpened by his hypostatic analysis: the icon and its prototype share the same hypostasis but differ in essence (the one is wood and paint, the other is the living Christ), and the honor shown to the image passes to the prototype — to the person depicted, not to the material (cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45; Theodore, Antirrhetici III; trans. Roth, 1981). The veneration is therefore relative (schetike): it is proskynesis, the bow of honor, directed through the image to the person, and never latreia, the worship due to God alone. This distinction, the load-bearing safeguard of the whole practice, is set out in the companion file (see Circumscription and Veneration).

The Supporting Works

Around the three Refutations Theodore wrote a cluster of shorter anti-iconoclast pieces, all gathered in Roth’s translation:

The Seven Chapters Against the Iconoclasts — a compact statement of the case in seven points.
The Questions Posed to the Iconoclasts (Problemata) — a set of dilemmas turned back on the iconoclasts, forcing their position into the heresies it implies.
The Letter to His Father Plato on the Veneration of the Sacred Images — addressed to his uncle and former abbot St. Plato of Sakkoudion (see Family and Sakkoudion), an accessible exposition of the doctrine.
The Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems — answering the iconoclast verses (such as those Leo V had set up at the Chalke Gate, which Theodore’s own iambics opposed; see Poems, Canons, and the Scriptorium).

Together these constitute the most complete and rigorous defense of the icons produced in the iconoclast age — the theological armory of the resistance Theodore led (see The Resistance), and the work that, with St. John of Damascus’s earlier treatises, stands permanently behind the Orthodox theology of the icon.

The Place of the Antirrhetics in the Tradition

The Antirrhetics did not create a new doctrine; they completed an existing one. Nicaea II (787) had defined the veneration of the icons and grounded it in the Incarnation and the Basilian principle that the honor passes to the prototype; St. John of Damascus had supplied the theology of the image and the dignity of matter (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils and St. John of Damascus). What was still missing, and what the second iconoclasm’s Christological argument exposed, was the precise account of what an icon depicts — and that Theodore supplied with his doctrine of the hypostatic image. After Theodore the case was complete: the Christology of the icon was nailed down, the iconoclast dilemma broken at its root, and the way prepared for the final vindication of 843 (see Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy). The Orthodox Church has venerated the icons on Theodore’s terms ever since.

The Dialectical Form and Method

The form of the Antirrhetics is itself part of their argument. Each of the three is cast as a dialogue between an orthodoxos and a heretikos — the orthodox speaker stating the case, the heretic raising the iconoclast objection, the orthodox answering — so that the treatise advances not as continuous exposition but as a sequence of challenge and refutation (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 1–40). The choice is disciplined: by putting the objections in the heretic’s own mouth and stating them in their sharpest form before answering, Theodore obliges himself to meet the strongest version of the opposing case rather than a caricature of it. The method is antirrhetic in the exact sense — a “speaking-against,” a point-by-point counter-statement — and it gives the work its characteristic texture: terse, syllogistic, pressing a distinction until the iconoclast position is shown to collapse into one of the recognized heresies.

That syllogistic temper is the second feature of his method. Theodore argues like a logician, deploying the Aristotelian apparatus of the schools — genus and species, nature and individual, relation (pros ti), homonymy and the categories — to fix the terms of the dispute with a precision the earlier iconophile literature had not attempted (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 80–140, who reads the Antirrhetics as a sustained exercise in philosophical theology). Where St. John of Damascus had argued chiefly from Scripture, the Fathers, and the theology of the Incarnation, Theodore adds a rigorous conceptual analysis of what an image is: the logical relation between image and prototype, the sense in which they are “the same” and the sense in which they differ, the category of relatives under which veneration falls. This is why Tollefsen treats the Antirrhetics as a work of philosophy as much as of dogmatics — and why the dialectical form and the syllogistic method together make the three Refutations the most analytically exacting defense the icons received in the whole controversy.

The Eucharist Is Not an Image but the Reality

One iconoclast argument deserves separate treatment, as the distinctive contribution of the second iconoclasm. The iconoclast council of Hieria (754), revived in the synod of 815, had argued that Christ left the Church only one legitimate “image” of Himself — the Eucharist, the consecrated bread and wine — and that this true image, made not by a painter but by Christ’s own institution, rendered the painted icon both superfluous and false. On this view the Eucharist is the icon of Christ, and to set up a manufactured image alongside it is to despise the one He gave (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 140–175; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 185–220; cf. the iconoclast Horos of 754, answered at Nicaea II, trans. NPNF II/14).

Theodore’s reply overturns the premise rather than the conclusion: the Eucharist is not an image of Christ at all — it is Christ. An image is, by definition, other than its prototype: it shares the prototype’s likeness (and, in Theodore’s analysis, its hypostasis) while differing from it in essence — the icon is wood and paint, not the living Christ. But the consecrated Gifts are not a likeness of the Body and Blood differing from them in essence; they are the Body and Blood, the very reality, present in truth and not in figure. To call the Eucharist an “image,” therefore, is a category error that would actually diminish it, reducing the real presence to a mere representation (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 140–175). The iconoclast has confused two orders: the icon belongs to the order of likeness, which presupposes a real difference of essence from what it depicts; the Eucharist belongs to the order of identity, the reality itself. Far from being the one true icon, the Eucharist is precisely not an icon, because nothing identical in essence with its prototype can be an image of it. The argument cuts cleanly: it defends the painted icon by refusing to let the iconoclast collapse image and reality into one term, and it simultaneously safeguards a high eucharistic realism — the Gifts are the truth, not a sign of the truth. In this single move Theodore both saves the icon and articulates a doctrine of the Eucharist the later tradition would hold as its own.

What Theodore Inherited and What He Added

It is essential to state with care what is new in the Antirrhetics and what is received, for Theodore refined the tradition; he did not replace it. From Nicaea II (787) he inherited the conciliar definition itself — that the icons of Christ, the Theotokos, the angels, and the saints are to be venerated; that the veneration (timetike proskynesis) is relative and distinct from the worship (latreia) due to God alone; and that the honor passes to the prototype (the Horos of Nicaea II, trans. NPNF II/14; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). From St. John of Damascus he inherited the theology of the image and the dignity of matter — that because God had become visible matter in the Incarnation, matter could now bear the holy and be depicted — and from St. Basil the formula that the honor of the image passes to the prototype (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45 [PG 32:149C]; see St. John of Damascus). None of this is Theodore’s invention; all of it he confessed and defended.

What he added was forced on him by the second iconoclasm’s Christological argument, which the earlier defenders had not faced in its developed form. John of Damascus, writing from outside the empire before Constantine V’s dilemma had been fully sharpened, had grounded the icon chiefly on the Incarnation and the holiness of matter, without the precise account of what an image depicts that the dilemma demanded (Tollefsen, 2018, pp. 40–80; Cholij, pp. 185–220). Theodore’s three additions answer exactly that gap: the argument from circumscribability — a true human nature is of its essence circumscribable, so that to deny Christ can be depicted is to deny He truly became man; the doctrine of the hypostatic image — every image depicts a person, never a nature, so that the icon of Christ portrays the one incarnate hypostasis in His human features and not “the divinity” or “a humanity,” dissolving the dilemma at its root; and the exact analysis of the image–prototype relation and of relative veneration as a category of relatives. These are refinements of a defined doctrine, not a new one — but the refinements that made it impregnable. After Theodore the iconoclast Christology had no purchase left, and it is in his terms that the Church has confessed the icon ever since (Tollefsen, 2018, conclusion).

References

Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons. Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series 6. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (Contains the three Refutations of the Iconoclasts, the Seven Chapters, the Questions Posed to the Iconoclasts, the Letter to Plato, and the Refutation of the Impious Poems.)
Theodore the Studite. Antirrhetici tres adversus iconomachos, PG 99:327–436 (Migne, 1860).
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 of the Antirrhetics and the Christological argument.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the icon theology and the hypostatic image.)
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.45 [PG 32:149C]; trans. NPNF II/8. (The principle that the honor of the image passes to the prototype.)
The Second Council of Nicaea (787). Horos (Definition) and Acts. Trans. in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14. (The conciliar definition of icon-veneration that Theodore refined, and the refutation of the iconoclast Horos of Hieria, 754, with its eucharistic-image argument.)