He is the image [Greek: ikon] of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. —Col 1:15
“I have seen a great many portraits of the Savior, and of Peter and Paul, which have been preserved up to our time,” Eusebius recorded in his History of the Church early in the fourth century. While visiting Caesarea Philippi in Galilee, he also noted seeing a centuries-old bronze statue of the Savior outside the house of the woman who had been cured of incessant bleeding by Christ. His witness is all the more compelling as Eusebius was one of those who regarded religious images as belonging more to the pagan world than to the Church.
According to legend, the first icon was made when King Abgar of Osroene, dying of leprosy, sent a message begging Jesus to visit him in Edessa and cure him. Hurrying toward Jerusalem and his crucifixion, Christ instead sent a healing gift. He pressed his face against a linen cloth, making the square of fabric bear his image. The miraculous icon remained in Edessa until the tenth century, when it was brought to Constantinople. Then, after the city was sacked by the Crusaders in 1204, it disappeared altogether. Known as “Not Made by Human Hands” or the “Holy Face,” the icon has often been reproduced down to our own day. A recently made copy from Russia is on the desk in front of me as I write this book.
In the western Church a similar story is associated with the name of Veronica, one of the women who comforted Jesus as he was bearing the cross. She offered him a cloth to wipe the blood and sweat from his face and afterward found she had received a miraculous image. A building along the Via Dolorosa associated with Veronica is today home to a community of the Little Sisters of Jesus who, appropriately, support themselves by selling icon prints mounted on olive wood.
The Apostle and Evangelist Luke is regarded as the first to paint an icon. (In the Orthodox Church, it is often said that an icon is written rather than painted but in this text I use what seems the plainer term.) Saint Luke is credited with three icons of Mary, in one case using the wood of the table where Christ’s mother and St. John ate their meals. The best known is “Our Lady of Tenderness” in which the face of the child Jesus is pressing his face against his mother’s. Another, the “Hodigitria,” has a more formal arrangement, showing Mary presenting her son to the viewer; it is known as “She Who Shows the Way.” Finally Luke painted an icon of Mary in prayer, with outstretched arms, an image sometimes seen in Orthodox churches over the Royal Doors at the center of the iconostasis or in the sanctuary above the altar. The placing of the icon near the altar serves as a reminder that Mary became the bridge linking heaven and earth.
Several ancient icons bear layer upon layer of paint as later iconographers restored work that had become too dark or too damaged with the passage of time. Perhaps at the foundation level of one or another ancient icon are brush strokes that were made by the hand of St. Luke - or perhaps not. Nearly all ancient icons were destroyed either during times of persecution in the first three centuries of the Christian era or during the iconoclastic periods in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Fortunately there are many Christian images from the age of martyrs that have survived, most notably in the Roman catacombs and burial houses but also in many other places, from Asia Minor to Spain. These frescoes are simple and sober images, made with few brush strokes and a narrow range of colors, with such subjects as Christ carrying a lamb, the three young men praising God from within a furnace, the raising of Lazarus, and the eucharistic meal. The catacombs bear witness that wherever Christians prayed, they sought to create a visual environment that reminded them of the Kingdom of God and helped them to pray.
Many early icons of a more developed style survive in Rome, though they are chiefly mosaics and thus have a monumental aspect, a type of public Christian art that only became possible after the age of persecution ended. In one of Rome’s earliest major churches, Santa Maria Maggiore, there are mosaics from the fourth century, but, as they are high up on the walls, you need binoculars to appreciate them. The large and vivid fifth century mosaic icons above and behind the altar, however, are easy to see and deeply moving. Among other Roman churches that contain impressive examples of iconography from the first millennium of Christianity are Sts. Cosmas and Damian, St. John Lateran, Santa Sabina, Santa Costanza, San Clemente, Santa Prassede, Santa Agnese fuori le Mura, Santa Maria in Trastevere, and San Paolo fuori le Mura.
Many early icons also survive in the monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai. Here we find icon portraits of both Christ and the Apostle Peter. Art historians date these from the sixth and seventh centuries. Both have an almost photographic realism. The style has much in common with Roman and Egyptian portraiture of classical times. They are probably similar to the icons mentioned by Eusebius.
Even if no original icon from the apostolic age has survived, one is impressed to see how, generation after generation, devout iconographers have sought to make faithful copies of earlier icons, a process that continues to the present day. Thus images of Christ and the Apostles are recognizable from century to century despite occasional changes in style. We know, for example, that Peter had thick curly hair while Paul was bald. Most important, the memory of Christ’s face is preserved.
Just as in our own time there is controversy about icons, so was there dispute in the early Church. Early critics of icons included Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix and Lactancius. Eusebius was not alone in fearing that the art of the pagan world carried with it the spirit of the pagan world while others objected on the basis of Old Testament restrictions of imagery. Christianity was, after all, born in a world in which many artists were employed doing religious, political and secular work. Idolatry was a normal part of pagan religious life. Thus we find that in the early centuries, in the many areas of controversy among Christians, there was division on questions of religious art and its place in spiritual life. It is instructive to notice that those who were reluctant to accept that Christ was God incarnate were also resistant to icons.
At the heart of all theological dispute, from that time into our own day, was the question: Who is Jesus Christ?
Some argued that Jesus was simply a man of such exemplary goodness that he was adopted by God as Son. Going further with this idea, others believed God so overwhelmed Jesus the Galilean that his manhood was gradually absorbed into divinity. There were those who argued that Jesus merely appeared to be a person of human flesh but was in reality pure spirit; flesh being subject to passions, illness and decay, they argued that God could never inhabit flesh.
Orthodoxy’s answer — that in the womb of Mary the Second Person of the Holy Trinity became a human being, thus that Jesus was both true God and true man — was both too simple and too radical for many people. How could the all-powerful God clothe divinity in that which can suffer death and corruption?
Discussion of this issue and its implications constituted the center point for the Church’s Ecumenical Councils. Though we find the Orthodox teaching already expressed in the creed of the first Council, in Nicea in 325, still it took centuries for the Church to shake off the influence of heresies which, in a variety of ways, denied the Incarnation. In fact, as we see in the churches today, the same arguments continue.
Each church assembly which affirmed the icon was affirming the Incarnation. For example the Quinisext Council in Trullo, in 692, while condemning “deceitful paintings that corrupt the intelligence by exciting shameful pleasures,” recognized the icon as a mirror of grace and truth. “In order to expose to the sight of all what is perfect,” the Council declared, “even with the help of painting, we decide that henceforth Christ our God must be presented in his human form…”
The argument over icons reached its boiling point in the eighth and ninth centuries at the time when Islam was rapidly spreading in areas that had formerly been Christian. In 725 the Emperor Leo III, ignoring the opposition of both Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople and Pope Gregory II in Rome, ordered the removal of icons from the churches and their destruction. He may have hoped his order would help stop the spread of Islam, which was firmly opposed to images in places of worship. Many iconographers from the Byzantine world fled to Italy, finding protection from the Pope. It was a period in which many who upheld orthodox belief suffered loss of property, imprisonment, beatings and mutilation.
Some iconoclasts argued that images of Christ, representing as they did his physical appearance, diminished his divinity by revealing only his humanity. One beneficial consequence of the iconoclastic movement was that makers of icons searched for better ways to represent in paint the hidden, spiritual reality rather than merely the physical aspects of the person represented.
The theologian who best defended the use of icons in Christian life was St. John of Damascus (676-749), a monk and poet kept safe from the power of the iconoclastic emperor through ironic circumstances — his monastery, Mar Saba, in the desert southeast of Jerusalem, was in an area under Islamic rule, out of reach of imperial edict. Here he wrote his essay “On the Divine Images” in which he reasoned:
If we made an image of the invisible God, we would certainly be in error … but we do not do anything of the kind; we do not err, in fact, if we make the image of God incarnate who appeared on earth in the flesh, who in his ineffable goodness, lived with men and assumed the nature, the volume, the form, and the color of the flesh…
St. John also responded to the arguments of those who regarded Old Testament prohibitions of religious imagery as also applying to the Church:
Since the invisible One became visible by taking on flesh, you can fashion the image of him whom you saw. Since he who has neither body nor form nor quantity nor quality, who goes beyond all grandeur by the excellence of his nature, he, being of divine nature, took on the condition of a slave and reduced himself to quantity and quality by clothing himself in human features. Therefore, paint on wood and present for contemplation him who desired to become visible.
The first iconoclastic period lasted until 780. Seven years later, at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the bishops rose in defense of the icon. The Council affirmed that it is not the icon itself which is venerated but the prototype whose image is represented in the icon. Iconoclasm was formally condemned.
Nonetheless, a second iconoclastic period, less severe than the first, was initiated by Emperor Leo V in 813. Orthodox resistance included an impressive act of civil disobedience — an icon-bearing procession in Constantinople by a thousand monks. With the death of the Emperor Theophilus in 842, imperial objections to icons ended. In 843, Theodora, widow of the former Emperor, who herself possessed icons, convened a Council which reaffirmed the teaching of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and confirmed the place of the icon in Christian life. The first Sunday of Great Lent was set aside henceforth to celebrate the Triumph of Orthodoxy, a custom maintained to the present day in the Orthodox world when the faithful bring their home icons to the church. One of the texts sung on the Sunday of Orthodoxy declares:
The indefinable Word of the Father made Himself definable, having taken flesh of thee, O Mother of God, and having refashioned the soiled image of man to its former estate, has suffused it with Divine beauty. Confessing salvation, we show it forth in deed and word.
If in Byzantium the encounter with Islam initially had a devastating effect on icons, further north the Tartar invasion and occupation of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was to have a disruptive impact on every aspect of religious life among the Russian people, themselves latecomers to Christianity, their conversion having begun in Kiev at the end of the tenth century. Very little iconography of the first few centuries of Christian culture in Russia survives. But from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, iconography was to reach heights in Russia that many regard as unparalleled before or since. The most renowned figure of the period is St. Andrei Rublev, first noted in 1405 while working in a cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin as a student of the master iconographer Theophanes the Greek. In 1425 St. Andrei painted the Holy Trinity icon, widely regarded as the highest achievement in iconographic art. St. Andrei’s other masterpieces include the Savior of Zvenigorod, remarkable for the profound sense of love and mercy communicated in Christ’s face.
For generations Russia was a paradise of iconographic art characterized by simplicity of line, vivid, harmonious colors, grace of gesture, an amazing freshness and transparency. But in the mid-sixteenth century one begins to notice signs of decay. Complexity of design begins to take the place of simplicity while colors become duller and darker. Russian art historians attribute the change, at least in part, to the influence of prints being imported from the west. By the seventeenth century the process was well advanced. “Decline was the result of a deep spiritual crisis, a secularization of religious consciousness,” writes the iconographer and scholar Leonid Ouspensky, “thanks to which, despite the vigorous opposition of the Church [which ordered the destruction of icons influenced by the artistic methods of the Renaissance], there began the penetration not merely of separate elements but of the very principles of religious art….”
Speeding the process of secularization was Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725). He avidly promoted imitation of all things western in every field, including church architecture and religious art, a process carried further by his successors. By the middle of the eighteenth century few painted icons in the traditional way, nor was their work welcomed in many churches. Traditional iconography was replaced by third-rate imitation of second-rate western religious painting — “caricatures of icons,” as Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov, a nineteenth century Russian prelate, remarked.
Peter the Great abolished the office of Patriarch of Moscow; afterward the Russian Orthodox Church was treated as a department of government. State control lasted until the abdication of the Tsar Nicholas II in 1917 — and then came the Bolshevik Revolution and a period of persecution such as Christianity hadn’t experienced since Nero. Not only were countless icons destroyed but millions of Orthodox believers perished as well.
It was not only in Russia that iconographers turned toward western approaches to religious art. Similar influences were at work in other Orthodox countries. As a result, today one finds in many Orthodox churches in almost any country an odd mixture of classic iconography and much that, at best, can be appreciated for its sincerity and, at worst, dismissed as suitable only for the basement.
Thanks largely to the uncovering and restoration of many ancient icons, the past hundred years have witnessed a gradual re-birth of appreciation of classic iconography. Today one finds good reproductions of iconographic masterpieces, not only in churches but in homes and even in offices. But it is not only a matter of reproductions. Increasingly talented iconographers are being trained in traditional methods and in the spiritual life that sustains iconography. The result is that good hand-painted icons are becoming more common.
Neither my wife nor I grew up in homes where icons had a place or where Mary was revered. In Nancy’s case, growing up in a Dutch Reformed parish, Mary was hardly mentioned. To have a devotion to Mary was, by definition, something Catholic and therefore unthinkable. “One thing that was made very clear to us,” Nancy recalls, “is that whatever we were, we weren’t Catholics, still less Orthodox, which we hardly knew existed.”
In Reformed thinking, you couldn’t be a Protestant and have a devotion to any saint. The reasons behind this stance have much to do with commercial traffic in the relics of saints in the period that produced the Reformation. Many devout people in the age of Calvin saw that the Roman Catholic Church was giving more stress to saints than to Christ and the Bible. The abuses and distortions were real enough, but attempts to purify church life often resulted in over-reaction. The baby was thrown out with the bath water.
Early in our marriage, Nancy asked if I could “explain” Mary to her. I burst out laughing. How could anyone possibly explain Mary? But I assured her that her question was a prayer and that Mary would answer it herself. And she has many times. For years Nancy has kept a small icon called “The Mother of God of the Holy Sign” on her night table.
One of the aspects of Mary that Nancy admires is her freedom. She wasn’t forced to bear Christ. The Archangel Gabriel appeared to her and asked if she were willing. “Be it done to me according to your word,” she responded. No “yes” that was ever spoken had so much significance. Through Mary we have Christ. Through her flesh he took flesh. She gave birth to the Savior, nourished him, cared for him, raised him, and accompanied him as a disciple. She is linked with his first miracle, the transformation of water to wine at a wedding feast. She was at the foot of the cross when he was crucified. While dying, Christ called on the Apostle John to take care of her as if he were her son. Given her role in our salvation, is it surprising that the Orthodox Church speaks of her in the Liturgy as “more honorable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim”?
“The Church never separates Mother and Son, she who was incarnated by him who was incarnate” writes Fr. Sergius Bulgakov. “In adoring the humanity of Christ, we venerate his mother, from whom he received that humanity and who, in her person, represents the whole of humanity.”
From an early time Christians began to refer to her as the Mother of the Church, finding in her a person who in every way provides a model of discipleship.
One of the earliest non-biblical texts about Mary, written about 90 AD, is found in the Letters of St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch: “And the virginity of Mary was hidden from the ruler of this world, as were her giving birth and likewise the death of the Lord — three secrets to be cried out aloud which were accompanied by the silence of God.” Elsewhere he writes of the Lord being born “out of Mary and out of God.”
Late in the second century we find St. Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, describing Mary as the new Eve: “Just as Eve, wife of Adam, yet still a virgin … became by her disobedience the cause of death for herself and the whole human race, so Mary, too, espoused yet a virgin, became by her obedience the cause of salvation for herself and the whole human race … And so it was that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by Mary’s obedience.”
For the fourth century poet and hymn writer, St. Ephraim the Syrian, Mary is “your mother, your sister, your spouse, your handmaiden.”
Mary is found in many icons, most frequently simply holding Christ. Though the icons have numerous variations, always one hand gestures toward her son, the action that sums up her entire life to the present day. In some icons, his face is pressed against his mother’s, an action of tender love and a reminder that his body was knit from her flesh. Mary is often depicted as the throne from which Christ reigns. Looking at the iconostasis, the screen of icons that marks the border between the main part of the church and the sanctuary, we find Mary in more than half the panels of the festal tier (the line of icons for the principal holy days). In the icon of Christ’s Ascension, Mary stands in the very center of the community of believers, the Church.
The Church’s attention to Mary was an integral part of its defense of the Incarnation. For the Gnostics, who sought redemption from the flesh, the flesh of Christ was a problem, for flesh in their view was synonymous with corruption and evil. For them Christ was not born of Mary but descended into Jesus, the son of Mary, at his baptism. Mary, therefore, was of no importance. Docetism, the most extreme form of the Gnostic heresy, denied that Christ had a truly human body; he simply appeared to have flesh.
For Orthodox Christianity, salvation was of the flesh, not from it, and icons served both as an affirmation of the Incarnation and of the significance of matter itself. “The title [of Mary as] Theotokos [God-bearer or Mother of God] contains the whole mystery of the Incarnation,” wrote St. John of Damascus, the most articulate defender of icons.
Mary is the first and greatest of saints: a person living in Christ for whom nothing takes priority over living out God’s will. Such people are marked by love, courage, freedom and obedience. They are whole, and for this reason we call them holy. The family of words to which holy belongs includes whole, wholesome, healthy and the Old English word for Savior, Hælend. The halos placed around the heads of saints in icons suggest the light of Christ that shines through them. Each saint in a unique way reveals something about who Christ is. In some way each saint draws us closer to Christ.
Most of the saints of the early Church were martyrs, so named from the Greek word for witness; they gave witness by shedding their blood, not that they sought death but that they would rather die than deny or compromise their faith in Christ. The places they were buried quickly became places where the local church celebrated the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Reverent care for the bodies of those who died for the faith was a hallmark of the Church from its first days. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” wrote Tertullian early in the third century.
“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” wrote St. Paul, “let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”
The cloud of witnesses is the communion of saints: all those who have given an example of heroic perseverance in the race toward the Kingdom of God. People without faith regard the saints as dead and gone. But the Church declares that we find in Christ all those whose life was Christ. The saints are not simply remembered as having once set a good example but they become our companions in day-to-day life. One of the earliest definitions of the Church was the Communion of Saints. They are near to us, nearer than we imagine.
I think of a surprising letter I received in 1994 from my Lutheran friend, Bobbie Stewart, whose church tends to regard devotion to Mary or any other saint with alarm. She had gone to Mexico to take part in a theological seminar, but the great event of her visit occurred at the cathedral commemorating the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to an Aztec Indian in 1531.
“Once inside the church,” she wrote, “I said a prayer to Our Lady. And sitting there, I felt I was surrounded and then infused with this incredible love. I knew that Mary held me in her heart — and I knew that she held all of us in her heart. And for the first time I understood — beyond words — how God could care for each of us. I always believed God loves us all, but there are so many of us that I never figured God could really notice or attend to each of us as individuals. But having experienced how Our Lady does it, I could begin to understand that God can. Bringing this experience back from Mexico has made me feel a consciousness that each person I meet, and everyone I see on the street is held in Mary’s heart, so I try to look at them that way. I don’t always succeed, but I keep working at it.”
I recall another experience involving a Protestant friend, Hannes de Graaf, who taught for many years at the University of Utrecht. As a young man his interest in the novels of Dostoevsky led him to learn Russian, a language which he put to good use later in life, during the Cold War, when he would occasionally travel to Russia to make contact with Christians.
One day he was in an Orthodox Church in Moscow standing in front of an icon of Mary and Christ when an old Russian woman approached him. She could see at a glance that Hannes was a foreigner. Few Russians could afford such clothing. And she could see he wasn’t Orthodox — he hadn’t crossed himself, he hadn’t kissed the icon. He was looking at it as one might look at a painting in a museum. “Where do you come from?” she asked. “Holland,” Hannes replied. “Oh yes, Holland. And are there believers [as Russians refer to Christians] in Holland?” “Yes, most people in Holland belong to a church.” He could see the doubt in her face.
She began to cross-examine him. “And you also are a believer?” “Yes, in fact I teach theology at the university.” “And people in Holland, they go to church on Sunday?” “Yes, most people go to church. We have churches in every town and village.” “And they believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?” She crossed herself as she said the words. “Oh yes,” Hannes assured her, but the doubt in her face increased — why had he not crossed himself? Then she looked at the icon and asked, “And do you love the Mother of God?” Now Hannes was at a loss and stood for a moment in silence. Good Calvinist that he was, he could hardly say yes. Then he said, “I have great respect for her.” “Such a pity,” she replied in a pained voice, “but I will pray for you.” Immediately she crossed herself, kissed the icon and stood before it in prayer.”