The Boundary of Veneration

The Church honors the angels, paints their icons, dedicates churches to them, and asks their prayers — and yet the Scriptures forbid the worship of angels (Colossians 2:18), and a canon of the Council of Laodicea (canon 35) condemns it as covert idolatry. This file confesses, from within the Orthodox tradition, how the line is drawn: the honor (proskynēsis) given to a fellow-creature is categorically distinct from the worship (latreia) due to God alone, so that to venerate the angels rightly is to honor God’s servants, while to worship them is to fall into idolatry — and the Church’s ordered feast of the Bodiless Powers stands precisely over against the disordered angel-cult the canon condemned.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Scriptural Prohibition

The New Testament itself forbids the worship of angels, twice and pointedly. St. Paul warns the Colossians against those who would beguile them “in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels [Greek thrēskeia tōn angelōn], intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind” (Colossians 2:18) — a rebuke of a religiosity that had made a cult of the angelic powers, displacing Christ the Head. And in the Apocalypse, when John twice falls to worship at the feet of the interpreting angel, the angel refuses him absolutely: “See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant… worship God” (Revelation 22:8–9; cf. 19:10). The highest angel of the vision deflects worship from itself to God, and gives the Church her own rule from an angel’s mouth: the angels are fellow-servants, and worship belongs to God alone (see Angels in the New Testament).

The Canon of Laodicea

The early Church met an actual angel-cult and legislated against it. The Council of Laodicea (fourth century), in its canon 35, decreed: “Christians must not forsake the Church of God, and go away and invoke angels [Greek angelous onomazein] and hold assemblies; these things are forbidden. If, therefore, anyone is found devoting himself to this covert idolatry, let him be anathema, because he has forsaken our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and gone over to idolatry” (Council of Laodicea, canon 35; trans. NPNF II/14). The canon was aimed, on the ancient interpretation preserved by Theodoret, at a Phrygian sectarian practice that made the angels objects of a cult and mediators invoked apart from Christ — precisely the “worshipping of angels” Paul had condemned (Theodoret, commentary on Colossians 2:18; NPNF II/14 note on the canon). Angelolatry — the worship of angels — is thus condemned by the Church with an anathema.

How the Line Is Drawn

The Orthodox resolution of the apparent tension — between the prohibition of angel-worship and the Church’s evident honoring of the angels — is the same distinction the seventh Ecumenical Council drew for the whole theology of the image, and it is confessed here from within the Church as her teaching. Worship in the strict and absolute sense — latreia, adoration — is due to God alone: to the Holy Trinity, the uncreated Creator, and to none else. What is given to the angels (and to the saints, and to their icons) is proskynēsis — honor, veneration, reverence — a relative honor that is categorically different in kind, not merely in degree, from the worship of God, and that passes through the creature to the God who is glorified in His servants (Second Council of Nicaea, 787, the latreia / proskynēsis distinction; John of Damascus, On the Divine Images; and see Holy Icons). To venerate an angel is to honor a fellow-servant of God and to ask its intercession; to worship an angel is to render to a creature the adoration due only to the Creator, and this the Church forbids as idolatry.

The boundary is not a verbal nicety but the very thing the angel of the Apocalypse insisted on. The rightly-venerated angel is honored as a servant of God, and the honor terminates in God; the wrongly-worshipped angel is set in the place of God, and the worship is stolen from Him. The whole grammar of the angel-icon reinforces the right relation: it shows a servant — a listener, a deacon, a fellow-creature contemplating God in its mirror — so that the one who venerates the image venerates a servant and worships the Master (see How Angels Are Depicted). The angel’s own words, “worship God,” are the standing correction of every excess.

The Vindication of Right Honor

That the Church’s veneration of the angels is not the idolatry Laodicea condemned is shown by the whole texture of the tradition: the ordered feast of the Synaxis of the Bodiless Powers (8 November) honors the angels precisely as the servants and ministers of God, and the traditional synaxarion connects the very establishment of that right honoring with the Laodicean condemnation of the disordered cult — so that the feast stands over against angelolatry, not with it (see The Bodiless Powers in the Calendar). The cult of the Archangel Michael at Chonae, likewise, is the vindication of right angelic honor: a shrine where the Archangel is venerated as God’s servant and worker of a saving miracle, its wonder ascribed to God who acts through His angel, and the healing spring received as God’s gift through Michael’s ministry — veneration of the angel that terminates in the glory of God, not adoration of the angel in God’s place (the Chonae narrative in Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael). The Church’s answer to Colossians 2:18 is not to cease honoring the angels but to honor them rightly — as fellow-servants whose glory is God’s glory in them.

A Word to the Tradition’s Own Edge

Confessing this from within the Church also means confessing honestly where popular devotion can drift toward the very line the canon guards. When angel-piety becomes a fascination with angelic names and powers apart from Christ, an invocation of the “seven” as quasi-independent mediators, or a seeking of angelic experiences for their own sake, it approaches the thrēskeia tōn angelōn Paul condemned — which is exactly why the tradition holds the slender attestation of the four non-scriptural archangels soberly (see The Seven Archangels) and why the ascetic Fathers counsel against the pursuit of angelic visions (see The Demons and Spiritual Warfare; and, on delusion, The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance). The safeguard is the one the angel gave John: honor the fellow-servant, and worship God. Held to that rule, the veneration of the angels is not idolatry but its opposite — the recognition that God is glorious in His servants, and that to honor them is to honor Him.

See Also

References

  • Scripture: Colossians 2:18; Revelation 19:10; 22:8–9.
  • Council of Laodicea (4th c.), canon 35. Trans. NPNF II/14. (The anathema against invoking and worshipping angels as covert idolatry; Theodoret’s interpretation in the notes.)
  • Second Council of Nicaea (787): the distinction of latreia (worship, to God alone) from proskynēsis (relative honor, to the saints and angels and their icons). See Holy Icons.
  • John of Damascus. On the Divine Images (Three Treatises on the Divine Images). Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003. (The honor of the image passing to the prototype; the distinction of worship from veneration.)