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| "Christ the Merciful" in egg tempera (1965) by Photios Kontoglou |
Icons and the Feast of Orthodoxy
By Photios Kontoglou
By Photios Kontoglou
The Sunday before last was the first Sunday of Great Lent, on which the Church celebrates the Feast of Orthodoxy in remembrance of the Restoration of the Holy Icons. From the very first years of Christianity, Christians venerated the icons. But in time certain irreverent people appeared, the so-called heretics, who wished to give a new interpretation to many matters of religion, different from what the Apostles and the Holy Fathers had established. Thus there arose certain innovators who taught that Christians ought not to venerate the icons, because this was supposedly idolatry. These innovators were called Icon-fighters and Iconoclasts, and they caused great turmoil in the Byzantine state because they managed to win over many powerful figures of authority to their side.
The most demonic iconoclast was Theophilos, the son of Emperor Michael the Stammerer — he who, according to the well-known story, did not marry Kassiani but Theodora. During his reign many holy fathers were tortured and persecuted because they venerated the icons and taught the people to venerate them. After his death, Empress Theodora issued a decree that those who had been imprisoned and exiled for the veneration of the icons should be released. The iconoclast patriarch John was deposed, and Methodios — who had suffered greatly for the icons, even being shut up alive in a tomb — ascended the patriarchal throne.
From that terrible upheaval which took place in the Byzantine Empire for a hundred years, one may understand the great significance that the holy icons have for Christians, and especially for us Orthodox, who preserved in our icons their character of veneration. For the Westerners also have images, but they are not liturgical icons; rather, they are representational — that is, similar to ordinary naturalistic paintings. Liturgical icons are sanctified; for this reason many of them are also wonderworking, for whoever prays with faith.
The Holy Fathers of the Church, with the divinely inspired wisdom granted to them, shaped how we worship and the so-called liturgical art, and through these it became possible to express the intangible and mystical essence of religion. In this way dogma did not remain a dry formulation addressed only to the mind. Rather, through the ecclesiastical and liturgical arts — hymnography, architecture, iconography, as well as the arts that fashion the sacred vessels, the vestments, and everything found within the church — through these arts, dogma and mystery were able to enter the hearts of the faithful, transfigured from dry knowledge into living perception, and to enter souls by way of compunction. For this reason dogma became an empty word when worship and the liturgical expression accomplished through the ecclesiastical arts were lost.
Thus the Protestants believed that the liturgical expression of the mysteries was a conventional and mechanical mode of expression, and they abolished the liturgical arts. But in abolishing the mode through which the symbols were expressed, they lost the symbols themselves and the spiritual essence of religion; they lost dogma, which thus became a cold concept, incomprehensible and inaccessible to the human soul. For the only road by which dogma can reach the soul is through perception, not through mere reasoning.
Certain people in Europe, enlightened by divine grace, perceived these things, and with wonder and compunction were baptized and became Orthodox — that is, they came to the Church, which is the first and unchanging, the One, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Perhaps these converts may also become guides for us, so that we may perceive the height and depth of venerable Orthodoxy, which today stands like a solitary beacon amid the spiritual darkness of the world.
Source: From an article in Eleftheria, published on Sunday, April 5, 1959. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
