The Defense of the Icons

Nicaea II defined that icons are to be venerated with the relative honor (proskynēsis) that passes to the prototype, sharply distinguished from the worship (latreia) due to God alone. The defense rests on the Incarnation, argued classically by St. John of Damascus: because God became visible in the flesh, he can be depicted. When iconoclasm revived, St. Theodore the Studite gave the theology its most rigorous form. The Frankish Church, misreading the council through a faulty translation, dissented in the Libri Carolini.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Definition of 787

The Seventh Council overturned Hieria and defined the veneration of icons as belonging to the faith of the Church. Its central definition confesses that icons of Christ, the Theotokos, the angels, and the saints are to be set up in churches and honored — and it is precise about what that honor is and is not:

“…the venerable and holy images… are to be set forth… and to these should be given due salutation and honourable reverence (aspasmon kai timētikēn proskynēsin), not indeed that true worship of faith (latreian) which pertains alone to the divine nature… for the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents (hē tēs eikonos timē epi to prōtotypon diabainei), and he who reveres the image reveres in it the person (hypostasis) represented.”
(Council of Nicaea II, Definition, 787; trans. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14)

Two things are decisive here. First, the distinction of proskynēsis from latreia (below). Second, the principle — quoted from St. Basil — that “the honour paid to the image passes to the prototype” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45, on the imperial image; cited by the council). The icon is not worshipped as if it were itself divine; it is honored as a window, the reverence passing through it to the person depicted. To kiss an icon of Christ is to reverence Christ, not the wood and paint. The council thus restored icon-veneration not as a concession to popular piety but as a dogmatic requirement bound to the Incarnation.

Latreia and Proskynesis

The council’s most important conceptual instrument was the distinction between two kinds of honor, a distinction the iconoclasts had collapsed when they called all image-veneration “idolatry.” Latreia (λατρεία) is adoration, the absolute worship due to God alone — the worship that, offered to any creature, is idolatry. Proskynēsis (προσκύνησις) is reverence, relative honor, the veneration that may rightly be shown to what is holy: to the emperor, to holy places, to the Gospel book, the Cross, the relics of the saints, and the icons — an honor that in the case of the icon does not terminate in the image but passes to the prototype it represents (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images [Contra imaginum calumniatores] III.28–40, on the kinds of veneration; Nicaea II, Definition; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979). The Orthodox thus do not “worship” icons and never claimed to; they venerate them, and the object of worship remains God alone. This distinction — worship to God, veneration to the holy — is the permanent Orthodox answer to the charge of idolatry, and it is the precise line the Second Commandment’s prohibition of worshipping images does not cross (see Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm).

The Incarnational Argument: John of Damascus

The theology that made the definition possible had been worked out a generation earlier by St. John of Damascus (c. 675–749), writing his Three Treatises on the Divine Images in defense of the icons while safe under Muslim rule (see St. John of Damascus). John’s argument answers the iconoclast Christological dilemma at its root by grounding the icon in the Incarnation (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.4, I.8, I.16; trans. Louth, PPS; Louth, St John Damascene, 2002):

The Incarnation makes God depictable. The Old Testament rightly forbade images of the invisible God, “for no man has seen God” — but “when he who is bodiless and without form… existing in the form of God, empties himself and takes the form of a servant… and is found in fashion as a man, then you may draw his image” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.8, paraphrased). To make an icon of Christ is not to circumscribe the uncircumscribable divinity but to depict the humanity that God truly assumed; to refuse to depict the incarnate Christ is implicitly to deny that God really became visible flesh. The icon is thus a confession of the Incarnation, and iconoclasm a covert denial of it.
The old prohibition was pedagogical and is fulfilled. The ban on images belonged to Israel’s condition before the Incarnation, guarding a people prone to idolatry from a God not yet made visible; with the Incarnation the condition is changed.
Matter is not to be despised. “I do not worship matter, but I worship the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material… and through matter worked my salvation” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16). Because God sanctified matter by taking flesh, matter — wood, paint, the very stuff of an icon — can be a vehicle of grace. This answers the iconoclast contempt for material images with the logic of a sacramental, incarnational world.

John’s argument shows that the icon is not the opposite of the Christological councils but their fruit: the possibility of the icon rests on exactly the reality — one Christ, truly God and truly man, truly incarnate — that Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III defined. This is why the restoration of the icons is celebrated as the summation of all seven councils.

The Second Iconoclasm and Theodore the Studite

The victory of 787 was not final. Under Leo V a second iconoclasm broke out in 815, backed by a new iconoclast synod, and lasted until 843. Its greatest opponent was St. Theodore the Studite (759–826), abbot of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, who suffered exile and scourging for the icons and gave the iconodule theology its most philosophically rigorous form (see St. Theodore the Studite). Theodore pressed the argument from the particularity of the person: what an icon depicts is not a “nature” (which the iconoclasts rightly said cannot be circumscribed) but a hypostasis — the concrete person of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who as a real human individual is genuinely circumscribable; to be a real man is to be depictable, and to deny the icon is again to deny the reality of the humanity (Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetici [Refutations of the Iconoclasts]; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979). The second iconoclasm ended in 843 when the Empress Theodora, regent for Michael III, restored the icons definitively; the event is commemorated every year on the first Sunday of Great Lent as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” (see Councils in the Life of the Church).

The Frankish Reception and the Libri Carolini

The Seventh Council was received by Rome — Pope Hadrian I had sent legates and approved it — and throughout the East, but its reception in the Frankish realm of Charlemagne was, for a time, hostile, through a revealing accident of translation. The Latin version of the Acts that reached the Frankish court rendered the council’s careful Greek distinction badly: it translated the proskynēsis the council assigned to icons and the latreia it reserved for God both by the same Latin word (adoratio), so that the Franks read the council as decreeing that icons should be given the adoration due to God — precisely the idolatry Nicaea II had condemned (Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 2009; Louth, Greek East and Latin West, 2007). On this misunderstanding Charlemagne’s theologians (the work is associated with Theodulf of Orléans) composed the Libri Carolini (Opus Caroli regis contra synodum, c. 790–794), which attacked the council and staked out a middle Frankish position: icons are permissible and useful as ornament and for instruction and memory, but neither to be destroyed (against the iconoclasts) nor to be venerated (against, as they thought, Nicaea II). The Synod of Frankfurt (794) endorsed this rejection. The Frankish dissent thus rested largely on a mistranslation of the very distinction — veneration versus worship — that was the heart of the council’s teaching, and the Libri Carolini were never received by Rome; over time the Western Church came to accept the Seventh Council, though the Carolingian episode left a distinctively cooler Western attitude to the theology of the icon (Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 2009). The episode is a striking illustration of how much, in the reception of a council, can turn on the accuracy of its transmission.

References

Council of Nicaea II (787). Definition (Horos); Acts, Sessions 4–7. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; and Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), 2 vols., Liverpool University Press, 2018.
John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Contra imaginum calumniatores). Trans. Andrew Louth, Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003.
Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons (Antirrhetici). Trans. Catharine Roth, PPS. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1981.
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.45 (the honour of the image passing to the prototype). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Noble, Thomas F. X. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Greek East and Latin West: The Church, AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2007.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.